For most health and care organisations, it’s not sustainable or feasible to upskill everyone doing improvement work with advanced QI skills. Our Q Exchange project aims to address this by giving organisations the opportunity to train members of their own workforce as quality coaches.

For the past four years, we have been focused on co-producing a free teaching resource to support the development of skilled coaches for quality improvement.

A team of improvers from over 24 different organisations have collaborated over the past four years to create an engaging coaching programme for quality improvement.

The Q coaching programme is designed so that any health care organisation can tailor it to establish or strengthen their quality improvement capability.

By training up quality coaches, organisations can move from a dependence model, in which the QI team are responsible for improvement work, towards an independence model. Quality coaches are a key part of this approach, working with the central QI team. They use a coaching style to enable improvers to be more independent in their improvement approach.

What is a quality coach?

We co-produced a simple definition of a Quality Coach as one who works as a conduit between frontline staff and the QI team.

Quality coaches serve as a principal form of improvement support for staff, with more advanced skills and teaching offered by the QI team. The programme supports them to develop specialist knowledge and skills in coaching and improvement. They coach teams through each phase of a change journey, from design through to planning, testing, evaluation, implementation and beyond.

The key aspects of a Quality Coach include:

• A passion for QI, and has experience of running a project
• Dedicated time to support QI
• Knowledge of how to teach and explain the use of QI tools
• An ability to work to engage people and teams in QI
• Understanding how to develop and nurture relationships based on trust and support
• A skillful observer who can work with a team and provide guidance, support and encouragement about QI work.

Coaches are frontline staff who have been trained in how to coach and support teams through QI. They are champions of QI at a local level and together can help us to reach more members of staff.

Free resources

This is a free resource available to download for Q community members and beyond to use within their organisations or systems. It comes with a ready-to-use suite of materials including slides, a delegate handbook, guides for how to implement and deliver the programme, along with a range of other resources. The content and programme structure have been created to encourage local adaptation. We want organisations and individuals to bring their own expertise, coaching experiences, and personality to the programme.

There are four taught modules:

1.     Coaching and the Foundations of Improvement
2.     Working with People
3.     Coaching Measurement
4.     Human Side of Change

Each of these modules represents an essential area of expertise for a Quality Coach. The course materials and learning objectives align to this structure so that it is easy to follow.

Organisations are welcome to use and adapt materials as they would like, as long as the authors are given credit under the Creative Commons Share Alike copywright.

Who is this course for?

The Quality Coach programme is available for all those who are members of Q, or who want to join Q and become part of our improvement community. Ideal candidates for the programme are those  usually have quality improvement as part of their current role, and have a natural interest and desire to learn about the subject area.

Upon completion of the course, participants will be able to coach teams or individuals in the theory and practical application of quality improvement.

HSJ recognition for Best Educational Programme

In February of this year, we found out that the programme had been shortlisted for Best Educational Programme in the NHS by the HSJ Partnership awards.

This was a great vote of confidence in the programme. Going forwards, we hope that as more people adopt the programme we will be able to use to evidence the benefits and continuously improve the programme.

Find out more

Access the full suite of free materials on Quality Coaching.

Read more about how the programme works and how you can get started in adopting and adapting it in our Programme Leader Guide.

Register for the Train-the-Trainer programme by emailing our programme contacts Robin or Sid.

Join a community of over 250 improvement peers on the Coaching Improvement SIG.