At this Visit we heard directly from Jimmy Parvin and the team at Leeds Teaching Hospitals about how QI is embedded into their day-to-day work and all aspects of how the hospital is run.

By taking this approach, they have been able to introduce improvements, from reducing wait times in A&E to strengthening how the finance team works. This has been part of a five-year journey to transform their culture and ways of working to focus on improvement.

The hospital has been supported by healthcare improvement experts Virginia Mason Institute (VMI). The VMI approach uses a lean methodology to eliminate or reduce ‘waste’; tasks that do not add value to the process from the perspective of the patient. The focus is always patient first.  The mantra of leaders at VMI and the hospital is “problem framers not problem solvers”: empowering frontline staff to solve problems, and focusing on the wider culture change that allows this to happen.

The hospital call this approach ‘daily management.’ The use of ‘daily management’ is an important concept to enable staff to know, run, and improve their services.

Registration for this Visit is closed.

Why Leeds Teaching Hospitals?

Leeds Teaching Hospitals is one of five trusts across England who were selected to have consultancy support from Virginia Mason Institute (VMI) to embed a Systematic Quality Improvement approach. You can find out more and access the evaluation of on the Health Foundation website.

The hospital has embedded this approach in what they call ‘daily management’. This means that all staff – from clinicians through to the finance team – are working in a quality improvement-led way.

At this Visit, we heard from staff at Leeds Teaching Hospitals and VMI about their experience of embedding this approach, what it has achieved and how it continues to develop. By finding out how the approach operates in practice across all hospital teams, you will be able to identify the lessons for your own workplace or context.

What will I experience?

At this Visit we:

• Learned what ‘daily management’ QI methodology looks like at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, and how this has been adapted and adopted from VMI’s original methodology.
• Heard from different members of staff in both core business and clinical teams about the methodology in practice.
• Heard the key success and failures so far, including the implications of this approach during the pandemic.
• Participated in interactive activities to help reflect on how this approach might apply in your own context, with support from staff at Leeds Teaching Hospital.
• Attended a genba* walk, to see the approach in action (*Genba is a Japanese word meaning ‘the actual place’. Here it means ‘where the work happens’).

Reflections on the Leeds Improvement Method Journey

Professor Phil Wood

CEO, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust

“I’m delighted to see this summary of the Visit to Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. I’ve been part of our improvement journey from the very beginning of our relationship with the Virginia Mason Institute and as the current Chief Executive I am proud of the commitment of all our staff to continue our work and to share some of our experience as part of the NHS IMPACT programme.

I hope in this summary and video that we have demonstrated the central importance of developing an inclusive, collaborative and empowered culture as the foundations of a successful continuous improvement approach.

“It is only through having the confidence to empower frontline teams and to support their successes and failures that true sustainable and patient centred improvement to care will occur. The there is no endpoint to the work, but we focus on embedding the philosophy and skills in our frontline teams so that the ethos of improving how we deliver patient care becomes everyday business.”

In-person Visit to Leeds Teaching Hospitals and Virginia Mason Institute resources