Tell us a little bit about yourself and your improvement journey.
I am a Medical Director for an Integrated Care System (ICS) in the East of England, and a Consultant Neurologist. My personal quality improvement (QI) journey started in 2017, working with North West London CLAHRC on a patient flow improvement project. Learning the basics, I continued to apply the principles of QI methodology to my role as healthcare leader, incorporating elements of continuous measurement, Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) approach to service changes, process mapping, communication strategies and elevator pitches to lift the quality of the work that my team and I achieved.
In 2019 I undertook training in Improvement Science Coaching with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and East London Foundation Trust, and was able to continue my work coaching teams in theatre safety improvement, outpatient engagement and efficiency, and later managing the improvement team in a hospital in East London, securing permanent premises for them to run QI training and engagement.
What first attracted you to Q?
As an ICS Medical Director, my ambition is to establish a community of practice across the system, enabling health care improvement in real time in the workplace in every organisation and neighbourhood, aligned to a quality management system that plans, measures, assures and learns more consistently and more widely than can be achieved in individual organisations.
The health care assistant that notices that her patients lose their possessions and works with her team to design and implement in a local process to stop that from happening is my hero.
QI feeds my internal need to get the job done as efficiently and painlessly as possible. I’m not your archetypal QI-er – process mapping has its place, driver diagrams can often leave me cold, measurement needs to be really simple, and I can’t bear QI that is self-serving. However, QI in the workplace in real time, that learns and continually improves patient care, and is properly transformational is too often unrecognised and unrewarded. The health care assistant that notices that her patients lose their possessions and works with her team to design and implement in a local process to stop that from happening is my hero. Even better if she reassesses and makes more changes to make it even better!
What are you hoping to get out of Q?
I want to do a bit of ‘QI dating’ through Q – to meet like-minded improvers that want to make health a better place, are doing it day in day out, and that can teach me new things or challenge my thinking.