Meet the team

My name is Emma Adams and, together with my colleague Pete Dudgeon, we are privileged to be providing Q members with a programme of visits to organisations within and outside of the health and care sector.

If you’re new to Q or haven’t yet had the chance to look at what’s on offer for Q members, you may not know that you can access these visits for free. Or some of you may have already been on a Q Visit (which we hope you enjoyed) and may be interested in what we’ve got planned for the coming months.

Site visits, to organisations committed to continuous improvement, provide Q members with an opportunity to explore other environments and gain insights or connections that they can take back into their own workplace. We’ve had excellent feedback from members who have been on our visits, with many commenting on how they have taken the learning back to their workplace.  The other great thing about Q Visits is the opportunity to connect with other members from across the UK. In fact, given the level of chat at coffee time, we are wondering whether this isn’t their primary purpose!

The story so far

To date, we’ve provided 7 visits, from as far as Northumbria, to learn about Experience Based Co-design, right down to Bournemouth for Endoscopy Transformation. Along the way, Q members have learnt about systems’ engineering, Lean, appreciative inquiry and micro-systems coaching, all hosted by mixture of health and care, third sector and private organisations including GlaxoSmithKline and Unipart.

Upcoming visits

This year’s programme is developing nicely, with some opportunities to stretch your QI learning into new environments and areas of learning.

Agile Project Management- 7 March

In March, we have a visit booked to a software company in Bath, Mayden, that provides solutions for mental health services. The visit will provide attendees with a hands-on introduction to Agile project management – an approach that has revolutionised software development over the last ten years.  With strong links to the principles of quality improvement we follow in healthcare, Agile aims to deliver user-centred software quickly and responsively, with self-directed teams using continuous improvement and reflection in fortnightly “sprints”. Through a very interactive workshop, quality improvers will find plenty of things to learn about delivering better projects.

Improving Quality Across Systems and Organisations- 2 May 

Following the Mayden visit, we will be heading further north to Manchester to join the brilliant AQuA (Advancing Quality Alliance) team. The team provides extensive quality improvement support and capacity building across the North West, and participants will gain an insight into how to build and sustain improvements across complex systems and organisations.  Workshops will be held around the team’s key areas of work – system transformation, person-centred care, building improvement capability and delivering high quality care.  If you’re interested in AQuA’s work and would like the opportunity to quiz the team on how they did it, look out for the visit details on the Q Visits’ page.

Continuous Improvement- 7 June

In June we have received a great offer from NHS Blood & Transplant for Q members to have a nose around the blood production site in Filton, Bristol. The organisation has been transformed by adopting Lean and continuous improvement principles, and is opening it’s doors for Qs to see how this works in practice and to learn about how the organisation is further developing its approach.

In the pipeline

Opportunities in development for the rest of the year include visits to:

• Healthcare Improvement Scotland to learn about its whole-country improvement work
• Sheffield for a full day on how co-production and user engagement manifests in different organisations within the city
• Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch on its approach to improving safety
• The English Institute of Sport to see the sports & health science behind supporting our Olympians and Paralympians.

We’ve got other ideas and suggestions from Q members up our sleeve, so keep checking the Q visits page on the website for further information. In summary, there’s lots to see and lots to learn at venues across the country, plus the opportunity to meet other Q members.

We hope to see you at a visit near you soon!