Hi Rammya – thanks for leading a rewarding session on Friday.
A bit more about the ‘Connecting Q Locally’ fund, which is open to the Primary Care SIG to apply to.
The plan is indeed to open up again in October for applications. The decisions and funding release are likely to be around February/March.
The amounts that can be applied for are £5k-£20k.
The focus doesn’t need to be ‘local’ be can be thematic, profession-related etc too.
It would be great if the Primary Care SIG could develop something to apply for funding for.
The last major activity was a fabulous conference in Nov 2018, which included Don Berwick himself: https://youtu.be/FSSRXGSoVUI

Thanks for such an inspiring session with so much representation!

Thanks Rammya for holding the discussion it looks like there might be some promising things ahead but I think this will also need to involve a change in the HF’s approach. I havn’t been much involved with the HF and its comms since COVID but in some ways with all the changes in the community and the online meetings this does make a good area to look at QI and makes the conference more accessible for us.

I include some summary notes from a previous meeting about the Health Foundation and the experience of some of the primary care members
Application forms and processes are often overly onerous, presuming support capacity that is not available to primary care.
The pressures on primary care are extreme, making it very hard to take any time away from delivering day to day.
The context for primary care is so different, targeted opportunities may be needed.
The way funding call themes are framed often doesn’t connect with how primary care talk about improvement, or the issues they prioritise.
There are many individuals and groups doing great work in primary care, but it’s difficult to access funding unless its for advanced work at greater scale. Unless you have support and resources to get started, we can’t unlock the potential for this work to develop further, and be in a position to develop or join up.
It’s not easy to understand THF’s role relative to other organisations who provide support. There’s low visibility of other work underway and potential sources of support.
There was disappointment in how well Q was meeting the needs of primary care professionals and frustration at the lack of primary care speakers at the Q event.

The HF is also doing some surverys so I think we should feed back to them about the conference and how to offer QI. My own experience is that the applications and process were really complex and unnecessarily complex with really poor IT. If you have caring responsibilities or other work its almost impossible to try to complete especially with having to redo things when the IT platform keeps going down. I do hope the HF improves its processes and also importantly makes the time to give relevant feedback to unsuccessful applications. As far as voting systems go for things like the Q exchange I think patients should vote for subjects rather than a larger group of hospital based specialists how can drum up support for their projects in larger numbers. I did ask for a breakdown of figures of how many successful applications were from primary care and this was declined by the HF apparently they don’t want to put people off as most goes to secondary care applicants. I think for transparency it would be better to look at the figures and try to understand more. The current Q exchange is a good subject to choose let’s hope it is a more focused and easier process this time for others. There is also the suggestion at times that the primary care ideas are not worked up to a standard that the HF wants or feels is needed. Whilst there is always the opportunity to learn more I think the HF doesn’t always like to go to new fields and hasn’t done the work in primary care so feels more comfortable for going with what it is used to reviewing. So I think we should be asking for more primary care people to be reviweing the applications and should question feedback such as this hasn’t been done before as a good thing rather than a reason for not selecting.
It would also be helpful to know and understand the role of the THIS institute more and how that supports GP as good workers there, and I do like the work of Rebecca Fischer but we could see more of her on the HF site.
During Covid I have found Trish Greenlaigh’s twitter and work the most agile and accessible and perhaps the HF could look at a similar approach.