Tell us a little bit about yourself and your improvement journey.

I’m a Service Improvement Manager with Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board. I’m relatively new to the health service, joining Betsi in September 2021.

Much of my career was spent working in the heritage and information services sector for local charity organisations and local government. Before moving to Betsi, I was working as an Information Services Manager for a Welsh government sponsored body responsible for natural resources in Wales. It was here my improvement journey started in earnest. I enrolled on a half-day internal training session with the Continuous Improvement Team and it was here everything clicked into place.

There was one particular moment that sticks in my mind; the team was playing the famous W. Edwards Deming Red Bead experiment. The revelation about variation in processes and the use of control charts to understand the variation, blew my mind! I knew improvement was for me.

I was lucky enough to join the Continuous Improvement Team soon afterwards where I undertook my Lean Six Sigma training. This is a method that uses a collaborative team effort to improve performance by systematically removing waste and reducing variation. This enhanced my appetite for improvement even more.

What made you decide to apply to Q?

I became aware of Q while undertaking research into improvement within health care and found the scope of content on the Q website very useful. My new colleagues at Betsi also encouraged me to become a member. My main driver to join Q was to start engaging and learning from other people who had the same interests as me. I’m particularly interested in and passionate for the need of the application of system thinking and process management within health care (and improvement in general). While I was researching these topics, I found Q had Special Interest Groups (SIGs) which focused on such topics. Looking into these SIGs, I found people, openly and enthusiastically, providing a wealth of their experience and knowledge to other people who had a similar interest. I found this inspiring, and it made me want to learn more from these like-minded people.

What are you most looking forward to about being part of the community?

Since joining Q, I can see there are so many more benefits to be had beyond the slightly selfish reasons why I initially joined in the first place. Like those who inspired me to join, my hope is that I can start to engage, share and provide my own insights into SIGs. I particularly would like to share insights on systems thinking and process management.

Since joining I’ve also had my eyes opened to other SIGs which have attracted my interest. Q has such a wide breadth of improvement topics that I realise there are some areas in which I’m fairly unfamiliar with. I’m looking forward to expand my interest into these areas, creating new connections and meeting new people with fresh and different ideas.

And as always, I’m looking forward to the upcoming events and webinars that Q holds. I’ve always found these to be very informative and I’ve had engaging conversations during and after the events. For example, the recent QMS webinar series was great with a couple of thought provoking ideas being presented.

What would you say to someone considering joining Q?

Well, you probably won’t regret it – that’s always a good place to start.

I think what Q offers, and what it has offered me, is a platform for like-minded people who are working on improvement within health and care. It provides the space to come together to share knowledge, skills and experience. And through events, their specialist groups and so on, Q proactively supports people like me to learn from others to do improvement on a daily basis. I personally have benefited much since joining Q and I’m sure others will do the same when they join and start to reap the rewards Q can provide.

One final point: membership is free!

Find out more about joining Q