Rammya Mathew's activity
In group: Primary Care
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Rammya Mathew posted an update in the group Primary Care 3 years, 8 months ago
RE: Qexchange
From the responses I have had, the main barriers to applying for Qexchange grants seem to be: time to put in an application, funding to cover project management, skills in bid writing, and general awareness of QI across primary care. It definitely feels like we are not on an even footing with our secondary care colleagues who seem to have much better infrastructure to support QI initiatives and projects. I will feed this back to the Q team as promised, and will keep you posted as to where this discussion takes us. If anyone has anything further they would like to add, it’s still not too late to get in touch.
Thanks Rammya,
Agree with your points so far,
My application was a couple of years ago and hopefully some things have improved but from your post there is still room for more improvement. My experience has put me off making any further HF applications.
I felt barriers included poor communication and organisation within the health foundation. I have fed this back to them directly and in fairness they listened at the time.There was short notice on webinars with links that didn’t work or technical problems. This has a big impact if you only have a short time to join sessions. They were also held over lunch times when we are normally doing visits et. The template and platform to add information for the bid was faulty and kept losing information and at that time only one person could access. This took weeks to sort by myself and other members of the group who had a similar experience. The timelines for financial approval and information was too short. The voting system I don’t feel works on an equal basis as so few of us. Added to that the larger hospital groups had got medical students on their teams etc contacting the Q community members to drum up support by either Q messages or NHS email we just don’t have the time or resources to do this. Also it felt competitive rather than collaborative which is disappointing, with little meaningful interaction on the platform. There was also no good feedback from the HF on applications. I think the health foundation needs to look at how it approaches and understands primary care. To do that it needs to look at its own track record across all applications but it seems reluctant to do that and share any data on this. It acknowledges there are very few successful applications generally. There is also the implication that the applications are not quite up to standard whereas actually they might be, but the context isn’t understood. Until that changes I think progress will be slow. Given there is so much transformative work going on in primary care I hope there is some progress.
Thanks Liz for your insightful comments on your past experiences. My understanding is that the bids now involve an expression of interest as the first step in the application process, and this has meant that you don’t invest lots of work into writing up a lengthy bid, in the initial stages at least.
I met with Penny Pereira and Bryan Jones from the Health Foundation a couple of weeks ago to discuss how we can better support primary care in terms of accessing funding via grants – in particular the Q exchange grants. I do believe that by us reviving this group and getting people more engaged, we have a much better chance at being successful. For example, there may be people in the group with bid writing skills, project management skills etc. I’ve been told @paulbowie, for example, has had a lot of success with HF bids! So perhaps us providing informal mentoring and us proactively plugging high quality primary care ideas for Q exchange will be a good start. I will try and support with this towards the end of the year – as the next round of Qexchange is only launching in early 2022. In the meantime we potentially have access to a small pot of funding to do some work together as a SIG, so it could be a chance for us to prove that we can do this collectively and also demonstrate the value of supporting more QI work in primary care. @bryanjones – is there anything else you would like to add?
As Rammya says, the next round of Q Exchange will launch in early 2022. As we approach this date, the Q Exchange team would be more than happy to run a webinar for the primary care SIG, at a time that works best for you, to answer any questions about the application process and share some information that might be helpful about applying for Q Exchange. Do you think that would be helpful? If so, @Tarnia Mason, Project Lead, is the main contact for this work and she would love to connect with you both to shape this.