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

I’ve worked as a clinical pharmacist (mainly in acute trusts) for the last 7 years and I’m also a Darzi fellow working with Health Education England. Recently, I got the point in my career where I was doing a lot of really rewarding clinical work, but I found myself becoming frustrated with some of the inefficiencies within the system and my lack of ability to change some of the not so good stuff happening around me.

For the past couple of years I ended up working in safety, governance and actually doing some quality improvement particularly in my pharmacy roles. As a result, we redesigned our service, looked at how work flowed through our system to the hospital and ultimately, how pharmacy interacted with that. That was all really interesting, but at the level I was working at I found that I didn’t quite have either the really detailed knowledge or the influence I needed to really generate large scale change.

I ended up looking towards the Darzi fellowship which has given me a far broader perspective of systems working and I became part of the Q community this summer.

What first attracted you to Q?

Q gives us a way to actually harness the learning and the power of our collective knowledge to do something much broader and more transformational.

There are some amazing people working across the NHS in health and social care but unfortunately we’re not always attuned to what’s going on, which means that we don’t always link up with each other very well. There are pockets of great practice happening across the UK but we don’t always tie it together in a meaningful way.

For me, Q is an opportunity to collaborate with a broad group of people who are on similar journeys, doing similar interesting things. It gives us a way to actually harness the learning and the power of our collective knowledge to do something much broader and more transformational. We have a tendency to often work in silos when actually we need to get out there and share and collaborate.

What are you hoping to get out of Q?

Building a network of colleagues across the system to be able to tap into that wealth of experience and knowledge, both to further develop my own understanding of quality improvement as well as to explore other approaches, tools and techniques that are out there. I’m keen to run the work that I’m directly involved in in a more structured, evidence based way. As a clinician by background, my training didn’t focus much on this element, so it’s really important that there’re initiatives such as Q that allow us to begin to develop some of those skills.