One of the Q community’s greatest strengths is the collective insight it offers for how to make change happen and improve services.
One of the Q community’s greatest strengths is the collective insight it offers for how to make change happen and improve services. As the NHS grapples with how best to meet growing demands on services, the experience and perspective of Q is needed now more than ever – to provide genuinely constructive and helpful insights for how to improve care from those closest to the problems with a range of perspectives on how to deliver and achieve change.
This is why we are coming to Q for your help on a hot topic confronting health and care teams across the UK – how to improve the quality and value of outpatient care.
Today we are launching a survey of the Q community to help shed light on the biggest issues affecting the quality of outpatient care, and ideas for how services can be improved. We want to hear from all members of Q, no matter how you’ve interacted with outpatient services, whether as a patient, as someone who works in the NHS, as a researcher, or as a policy maker.
As we launch this survey we are also announcing that outpatient care will be one of the themes for the Q Exchange later this year, which will give the community a chance to develop ideas and bid for funding to test ways for improving these services.
The survey findings will be shared with the broader Q community to help support members’ own improvement work and to highlight areas of greatest potential as people think about their ideas for Q Exchange. It’s a chance to help shape NHS policy too: we’ll also share relevant learning with Q partners, NHS leaders and policymakers to inform the emerging agenda around outpatient reform. If there’s ever been a time when you’ve wanted to say to those running the NHS, ‘Don’t do it like that, do it like this’ then now’s your moment!
This survey is part of a larger experiment on how we might tap into the collective wisdom of Q to inform practice and policy.
This survey is part of a larger experiment on how we might tap into the collective wisdom of Q to inform practice and policy. The Health Foundation has been actively considering how we can best collect and pool the intelligence and experience of Q – to not only spread learning across its members, but to help NHS bodies and those responsible for supporting improvement nationally to design programmes in a way that reflects what will work well in practice.
Why outpatient care?
Improving outpatient services has been a dominant focus in each country of the UK over the past five years, driven by growing patient demand and issues with how services are designed and structured that can limit patient access and create inefficiencies.
In Scotland, for example, the government launched the Modern Outpatient programme that is working to reduce unnecessary visits to hospital and makes use of technology to help services become more responsive to patient needs. And most recently, the NHS Long Term Plan in England renewed the focus on outpatient care transformation, setting further ambitions for how care can be shifted closer to home and technology deployed to improve patient access and streamline services.
But delivering on these aims requires learning on the ground about how best to implement and sustain complex service changes – which is why we’re turning to Q.
So help us understand where some of the greatest opportunities and challenges are by filling out this survey. It should take only around 10 minutes to complete, and responses will be treated confidentially and communicated anonymously. For any questions or concerns, email: q@health.org.uk
Comments
Mark Sadler 25 Apr 2019
'Don't do it like that, do it like this.' - I wonder if a central resource should be set up to communicate this?
Two thoughts....
Firstly I used to work for Honda, and when a reoccurring problem happened on any vehicle it was recorded in the 'How to do' book. The problem along with cause and solution was then made available to all engineers and designers so that the problem would not happen again on future models.
Secondly I am thinking of the McDonalds type of 'Business in a box' philosophy where you unpack the box and read the enclosed manual and follow the 'How to do' instructions to ensure you follow the McDonalds model letter for letter.
Kaizen wise 'Communication' is even more important than measurement, and 'Standardisation' is the key to replicating Quality on a large scale. Both Honda and McDonalds are fantastic companies to learn from, perhaps we should make more effort to understand how and why they do things?