As promised – my reflections on what makes a successful Q exchange submission.

The theme for Q exchange 2021 will only be published in the Summer, but in my opinion it’s worth thinking about possible projects you could put forward from much earlier on – which is why I’m posting this now! Having read through the 2020 winning ideas, here are my top tips:

1. Many of the winning ideas involved collaboration between multiple partners. If you have an idea, consider whether you can build on it with other local or even national organisations. It might be worth talking to your Academic Health Science Network, your local Trust, or relevant Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise organisations.
2. Demonstrate how you will purposefully involve patients and the public in your project. Many of the winning project teams were co-producing their resources with end users, who in most cases were patients.
3. The reach of your project seems to be important – even if your idea will only be implemented in a particular region, you need to demonstrate how the learning from your project will be of benefit to a much wider group. You need to have a clear plan about how you will spread and share the learning.
4. It’s helpful to show that you have expertise in your project area – what results do you have to date to be able to demonstrate this?
5. You don’t need to pitch an entirely novel idea, although it can be helpful, it’s definitely not a must.
6. Surprisingly your project doesn’t need to be (what purists consider) QI. Many of the winning ideas were leaning more towards research, and others were training interventions. You do however need to tell the story of how this will improve whatever you are trying to improve – be that patient care, staff morale, system efficiency, knowledge base, and so on.
7. Remember the funding is for £30,000 – which doesn’t necessarily go very far. Quite a few of the winning teams were using the funding for work that they had already started in some way, or they were using the funding for a specific part of a bigger project.

Hope that is helpful. Happy to support anyone hoping to apply in 2021. I’ve uploaded these tips and saved them in the files section also, in case you want to refer to them later in the year.