Tell us a little bit about yourself and your improvement journey.
I work for Child And Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS) in the Belfast Health and Social Care Trust. I started as a Higher Clerical Officer and developed a firm understanding of the administrative process in the first instance. Being mostly involved in data collection, I have found this experience has been vital in understanding the data I collect. While in this job, I volunteered to help collate Experience of Service Questionnaires, and this was my first taste of data collection in aid of service improvement. I then moved into a temporary role as an Outcomes Information Officer where one of our psychologists mentored me. I developed an understanding and a primitive system for collecting Routine Outcome Measures (ROM). With the help of the Child Outcomes Research Consortium, I further developed my understanding of ROM and began gaining an interest in data and statistical analysis.
I started as a Higher Clerical Officer and developed a firm understanding of the administrative process in the first instance.
What first attracted you to Q?
When I moved to my current, permanent role, data collection became one of my main areas of work. This naturally led to me being included in multiple quality improvement (QI) and Safety Quality Belfast (SQB) projects. Through this, I met a member of staff who is in the Q community, and she recommended that I join, as it is a great opportunity to network, learn, share and develop my own skills. I am keen to immerse myself in QI, as over the past few years, I have found that not using the skills and ideologies often enough has led to my knowledge and understanding deteriorating, leading me to have to re-learn information. All staff should work to a QI methodology, and these techniques should be second nature to us.
What are you hoping to get out of Q?
I am mostly looking forward to networking with members and sharing innovative ideas. Often, I find that any idea I have, has already been done and robustly implemented elsewhere. This will allow me to further develop my data collection and analysis, as well as share any useful insights with other members.
I am interested in hearing other people’s stories, including their successes, but mostly their challenges; as this is where the most innovative ideas can come from.
I am very keen to learn about boosting engagement, and good practice in maintaining projects in the long term. I am keen to discover new technology that people may be using to allow easier and more efficient data collection from both service users and the multi-disciplinary team. I hope to use data to affect real change, so would like to be guided on how to appropriately present QI data to commissioners in a way that will effectively paint a picture of what resources our service needs to improve. I am interested in hearing other people’s stories, including their successes, but mostly their challenges; as this is where the most innovative ideas can come from. I often come up against the same barriers when trying something new, so would be keen to know how well established teams deal with these issues. Mostly, I want to improve the care provided to our service users, as the main aim of QI should always be service user wellbeing.