I have had an interest in improvement work since early on in my career. When District Nursing over 20 years ago I developed, along with my local Practice Nurse, an evidence based leg ulcer care pathway. Later whilst still in clinical practice I went on to become the Governance Lead for the locality I worked in and one of the major achievements of that position was my role in the implementation across the locality of the National Gold Standards Framework for End of Life Care. In the last 5 years my ongoing and growing interest and involvement with improvement led me to move to my current role as Quality and Effectiveness Lead for our local Health and Social Care Partnership in 2012. My role is evolving within the partnership but the following is a brief resume of my current responsibilities
•               Act as a change agent within the Partnership through the promotion of a continuous quality improvement focus within all service improvement and transformational change work.
•               Designing, delivering and supporting the implementation, spread and sustainability of change and improvement projects within the Partnership.
•               Working collaboratively with a range of stakeholders to secure the benefits of change/improvement projects within the Partnership.
•               Investigating, developing, implementing and analysing relevant measurement frameworks that demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of change/improvement projects and their impacts on patient care and experience.

Key priority area’s since taking up this post:
•               Recent and current involvement in the development and implementation of pathways to improve the flow of unscheduled care through Perth Royal Infirmary in an effort to improve whole system flow. Specifically I am currently working on developing a 'Discharge Hub' and 'Front Door Model' for Perth Royal Infirmary and am also involved in the development of a 'Discharge to Assess' model for Perth and Kinross
•               Development, implementation and evaluation of an Enhanced Community Support model of care.
•               Development, implementation and evaluation of discharge pathway for Perth Royal Infirmary including development and implementation of staff education sessions on discharge planning and the pathway.
•               Implementation of outcomes of Stroke Rapid Improvement Event including development of stroke pathways in Perth Royal Infirmary. Chair Perth Royal Infirmary’s Stroke Quality Improvement Group and support improvement work around the stroke pathway in relation to the Scottish Stroke Care Standards

I think I began to really understand what improvement was about when I was in clinical practice. Throughout my career, although I have developed a much more in-depth understanding of how to promote and embed improvement, my basic understanding of what Improvement is remains unchanged, to me improvement is about systematically striving to make the care and services we provide to the people we look after better. My belief that we should constantly strive to improve care led me to enrol in an MSc in Quality Improvement at Dundee University which I completed this year following completion of a piece of research about the Scottish Stroke Care Bundle for my dissertation. I hope that ultimately this piece of research will lead to improvements in the consistency of the bundles application within all hospitals in Scotland and am in the process of preparing to publish my findings.