I would like to introduce myself as your new Q Convenor in the North East and North Cumbria. This is a role which includes being a local and national Q ambassador as we work with the Q team to move the initiative forward. As a Convenor, I will be listening to Q members and getting your voice heard at regional and national level.

I am keen to explore with you how we can spread the QI message across our region as a means of solving some of our system challenges.

My background is in private industry (Areospace) but I have now worked in the NHS for over 25 years in various roles and settings such as GP Practice, Primary Care, Commissioning of services and within Acute, Community and Mental Health Providers. I am currently based in Carlisle and I work with the Cumbria Learning and Improvement Collaborative (CLIC), leading on the Continuous Service Improvement Strategy with STP partners in North and East Cumbria.

I am passionate about quality improvement and how we can all improve our services for patients, carers and service users; supporting staff in doing that by sharing skills, experience and knowledge. For the last four years I have worked with colleagues to help to embed a culture of continuous service improvement and develop capability and capacity for QI. I am keen to explore with you how we can spread the QI message across our region as a means of solving some of our system challenges. My early thinking is:

• We take our passion and mindset and use it to influence our STP in our region to help solve some of the “wicked issues” we all face, using a QI approach.
• Promoting an open mind to making improvements, challenging people’s way of thinking and developing a culture where we all have two jobs: to do our job and improve our job. This will help in our efforts to move towards a culture of QI where colleagues are more curious and reflective, wanting to learn and share with others to improve and allow the use of QI skills and networks of our Q members to help solve some of these difficult issues.  From this, we hope to expand the number of Q members when applications reopen in summer 2018.

As part of this vision, I will be looking to recruit 3 Q members from the North East and North Cumbria to form an honorary Commons Stewardship Group (CSG) to help me influence this process.  The Commons Stewardship Group is part of a new governance structure being piloted by the Health Foundation for an initial period of 12 months (see more on the Commons model).  In the very near future, we will be emailing our local Q members with a CSG member role description and asking you to consider expressing an interest in this voluntary position.

In the meantime, if you are interested in finding out more about my role and that of the CSG, then please get in touch, karen.morrell@northcumbriaccg.nhs.uk

I am very much looking forward to working with as many of you as possible to make this vision a reality.