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

My name is Salli and I’m currently the Interim Executive Director of Nursing and Professions at Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust. I live in West Yorkshire and work in South Yorkshire, but I’ve worked all over in my 25 years of continuous service for the NHS. This includes a number of national roles at NHS England.

I have good knowledge of improvement methodology and I’m a Fellow at the Yorkshire and Humber Improvement Academy. I’ve been involved with numerous programmes to improve health care at both local and national levels. For example, I led a taskforce for children and young people’s mental health inpatient services, whilst also leading the Improving Quality Team in the national learning disability and autism programme which I still advise on.

As a mental health nurse by background, I’m extremely passionate about improving health holistically for service users and ensuring that both physical and mental health needs are met for everyone using a person-centred and trauma-informed approach.

I’m also very passionate about ensuring that the health and wellbeing of NHS staff is supported, especially considering the difficulties of the last few years.

Although I’m in an Executive role, I continue to work closely with staff, service users and carers at all levels. I strongly believe that improvement can only be successfully if co-production is done properly and that this is central to how we should all work.

We’ve worked so incredibly hard at my trust to improve, and the next step of our journey is to monitor all Quality Improvement (QI) activity and to share our learning. I know that the Q community will be helpful for this.

What first attracted you to Q?

Many of my colleagues are Q members and I enjoy seeing them sharing their involvement with the Q community, particularly on social media.

I feel that the Q community will be a great place for my colleagues and I to learn from others and share our work.

I’m also keen to collaborate with like-minded colleagues nationally to tackle issues together.

I’m accountable for a number of programmes and workstreams, and I find using QI tools beneficial for summarising programme activity and to monitor improvement. Using QI tools, such as driver diagrams, also helps to make the information about improvement activity more accessible for everyone, including service users. I’m keen to encourage my teams to learn more about QI and how it can help the work they are already doing. I know that the Q community provides a number of opportunities to help with this learning and to also help us to share our learning too.

What are you hoping to get out of Q?

As a director, I realise that I have great responsibility and influence. Since I joined Q at the end of 2022, a number of my colleagues have also applied and I really want to keep this momentum going to help our trust to learn from the Q community, particularly other mental health trusts.

I know from my national roles how similar the issues faced in health care are in different regions and I want to support my trust colleagues to learn from others. I’m also aware of the importance of reflecting, learning and sharing work and getting feedback.

I know that the Q community can support this collaborative approach to improvement.

As mentioned earlier, I’m extremely passionate about co-production and I know that the Q community has forums and opportunities to share how co-production can be done well. For example, there have been a number of Q Exchange funded projects that have involved co-production that I hope to learn from. I’m keen to meet the Q members that have delivered these projects to receive support for our ideas through Q Exchange also.

I also hope we’ll be able to share our improvement journey, for example through the #QISpotlight series. Look out for all upcoming events in the series on the Q event page. Other specific support that I’m hoping to access includes the webinar series on Quality Management Systems which is something we are testing in our trust.

Want to learn more about Salli’s work? Get in touch.