Working across boundaries and within complex systems is the new reality for health and care services in the UK and as improvers we need to catch up.
Upskilling frontline staff in systems thinking and improvement methodologies is a powerful way to enable better system working and system-level improvements.
So, we were thrilled to be one of 20 projects funded through Q Exchange to develop an idea to support improvement across system boundaries. Our Systems QI Practitioner Programme got off to a great start with our first co-design session on 5 August and I hope our process and progress will be of interest to the wider Q community. We’d also love you to be involved, see more below.
What is the Systems QI Practitioner Programme?
The Systems QI Practitioner Programme aims to co-design a free-to-use educational programme to support systems and organisations to build QI and systems thinking and improvement capability in order to tackle complex system issues. This project is funded through the 2024 Q Exchange programme, ran by the Health Foundation.
Our ambition is to create a suite of learning resources to encourage spread and adoption of the programme nationally and internationally. These include:
- detailed slidesets with full slide notes
- a delivery guide, explaining how to set-up, plan, deliver and evaluate the programme locally in a system or provider
- a Systems QI handbook.
To ensure these products are of the highest quality we will pool expertise from across the Q community in the creation and design of the content. We will also test it thoroughly before publication in 2025.
We know from experience that this approach works well from our work on the Quality Coach Development Programme.
Outlining scope and programme content
To kickstart the project, on 5 August we ran a co-design afternoon virtually with those who had expressed an interest in this work. The session was a resounding success with more than 30 people in attendance from a broad range of geographies and sectors.
In the session we critiqued an outline scope of this work, as well as the intended audience of this educational programme. A critique of the draft scope is shown below.
Recognising this needs refinement, we moved on to our second mammoth task: To draft outline content for the programme and the possible key themes/modules that may form it. We used affinity mapping to help develop the content, which was really productive. Our key topics are:
- Systems thinking
- Convening and building relationships
- Leadership
- QI and Human Factors (Tools)
Image: Affinity diagram of the 4 main modules of the programme, plus additional considerations.
We know that this will evolve and change over time, but it is a great starting point for us. Thank you to all the attendees and contributors to this brilliant first session. We look forward to collaborating with you more on this.
Next steps
Over the coming weeks and months we will be delving deeper into these topics, with a view to developing a draft programme structure, modular structure and programme content in the autumn. We’re hoping to have a draft programme to test in a system by late Spring 2025.
Get involved
If you missed the first session you can still view the MURAL board we used to run it.
If you would like to add your own comments, please do so using the yellow Post-Session Comments box.
You can also view the recording of the session. (Note we used breakout rooms so there are gaps in the recording.)
We welcome further feedback on the scope and audience, as well as comments and ideas for content and topics and how you’d like to be involved.
We’d like to involve as many subject matter experts in systems improvement as possible. Please use the MURAL board or let us know how you think you could best contribute at qi@nhselect.org.uk.
We’d particularly encourage expressions of interest from those with experience in systems thinking, convening and from the wider public or with lived experience.