At our recent Quality Management Systems webinar series, we were joined by Jem Ramazanoglu, the QI lead at Central London Community Healthcare. Here’s what Jem had to say about the role of quality coaches:

“We often have improvement skills in a small group of experts, and we tend to be parachuted in to help fix problems. But that doesn’t always leave people able to fix their own problems when we’re not there, and often ends up with improvement just being a peripheral activity.

“People do it when there’s an issue, and then they go back to working the way they always work. That doesn’t embed a culture. That doesn’t change how we operate and how we think about solving the challenges that we’re facing.

“Learning about quality management systems really crystallises the need to embed improvement into the day job for everybody, and to ensure that everybody is using this on a routine basis.

“I was involved in a network with north central London’s quality improvement leads and we were talking about how we recognise between us that we have this gap.

“We all had really good foundation skills where we could introduce people to what QI is and train them in the basics, but we didn’t really have much beyond that to give people a depth of understanding.

“We identified there’s this need to have something that sits between the frontline improvers and this small central core team of experts, and that concept was a quality coach.”

The call was hosted by Emma Adams, convenor of the Complexity Approaches to support Quality Improvement SIG and Joy Furnival, former convenor of the Lean Healthcare SIG.

If you’re interested in becoming a quality coach, Sid Beech from the Coaching Improvement group is about to launch a Quality Coach Development Programme. If you’re interested, please fill out the expression of interest form it’ll take around 30 seconds.

Watch the session in full, or skip to the 37 minute mark to hear more from Jem:

More inspiration from our groups

• Claire Fountain shared a wrap-up from her recent conversation between Clinical Audit and QI in the Quality Management in Healthcare SIG. That includes the short-term opportunity of Clinical Audit Awareness Week, 19-23 June.
• Check out the latest Flash Report created by Hilda Campbell for the Nurturing and Weaving Networks SIG. These sensemaking documents help us take actionable steps out of the conversations we had during the event.
• The valuable help received in a ‘Peer Assist’ session drew great feedback too:
  

  “The amount of information I’ve got in the last 20 minutes is as much as I’ve been able to get in the last one year. It’s been priceless.”

• After being inspired by a recent Liberating Structures user group session, all about the power of storytelling, Gill Phillips decided to share her story via podcast.
• Join our newest group, the Philosophy and ethics for health care improvement SIG and show your support to its convenor Alan Cribb. We’re currently planning several fascinating discussions for 2023.
• I posted a video on ‘How to create meaningful connections through Q’s SIGs’. It’s focused on Q Exchange projects, but it might still have universally-applicable insights.
• The Third Sector SIG had its debut meeting led by Pete Donnelly. Catch up on the introductory meeting.

Upcoming Events

• 20 April: As always, our Liberating Structures user group meet-ups are one of the highlights of Q events – they are a practice space where Q members go to learn skills that can be immediately applicable to their work. Join our next call exploring Social Network Webbing, an intuitive social mapping tool.
• 20 April: Hilda Campbell is gathering allies to figure out how to make sense of the difficulties we all face when taking care of ourselves and others in our workplaces. Join the conversation.
• 24 April: Join Catherine Dale in our brand new mini-series on co-production, this time exploring co-design using a patient-experience lens to guide the whole improvement process.
• 28 April: Join the next webinar from the Quality Management Systems Series with Emma Adams. This one is called: “Putting an octopus into a string bag! How to improve together across systems, organisations & populations.” With a metaphor like that, who could resist?
• 11 May: Learn about the results of a five-year pan-European study into the opportunities and challenges for the pioneering Buurtzorg approach to care at home. Supported by the Reimagining Health and Care SIG.

On the horizon

After a year exploring the challenges Q members face in their workplaces, in particular focusing on the tools our community uses to tackle those challenges, the Nurturing and Weaving Networks SIG and Hilda Campbell are about to launch an open, free and widely available series of documents, including a poster, a toolkit and a book. They’re designed to make it easy for Q members to tap further into the collective intelligence of our network.

Those documents will vary in length and depth: from a one-pager aimed at people who are just beginning to understand Q’s tools and spaces to a 90 page-long self-led Improvement Journey you can take at your own pace, there are relevant lessons for you no matter what stage you are at.

We’ll talk about our launch soon, hope to see you there!