Learning and improving across systems

The practice of improvement is increasingly recognised as a key part of the solution to the unprecedented challenges faced by today’s health and care services. 

This was demonstrated by the launch of NHS IMPACT [ref]NHS England. NHS IMPACT (Improving Patient Care Together). [/​ref], NHS England’s single shared improvement approach, in April 2023. 

The need to build improvement skills across health and care systems, such as Integrated Care Boards, and to scale improvement has never been greater. But system-level improvement is complex, involving several organisations, many people, a variety of patient pathways and a mix of challenges. 

In June 2023, the Q community, NHS Confederation and the Health Foundation launched a partnership to support health and care systems to boost their improvement capabilities.

Learning and Improving Across Systems brings together the improvement expertise of the Health Foundation, the networks and relationships of NHS Confederation, and Q’s community of over 5,000 people working to improve health and care.

The partnership is working with health and care systems to:

• develop learning and improvement approaches needed to meet system goals
• galvanise local improvement ideas and expertise, helping leaders connect from the board to the ​‘frontline’ of delivering change
• pool evidence and experience to understand and make progress on priority topics together
• share and scale what we’re learning across systems.

Through the partnership, we aim to boost system-level capability to learn and improve collaboratively. An expanding programme of support is available to people leading improvement work at a system level. 

We are offering:

• A peer learning programme which brings together participants to learn with and from each other, offering a range of tools and approaches to meet leadership needs, and connects them to local improvement ideas and expertise.
• Practical resources and connections to support implementation in practice.
• A report by Professor Sir Chris Ham [ref] Professor Sir Chris Ham. Improving health and care at scale: learning from the experience of systems. 2023 [/​ref] with eight case studies of systems, their approaches to improvement and the results so far. 
• A podcast, Leading Improvement in Health and Care, co-hosted by Penny Pereira and Matthew Taylor.

Our work together is grounded in a learning framework. It supports leaders to recognise, navigate and holistically plan improvement to improve health and care across systems. This tool also helps work through what NHS IMPACT means in practice.