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Exchange

Activating ideas together through Q's funding programme.

Have you got a great idea that you’d like to get £40,000 of funding for?

Q Exchange offers Q members the chance to develop project ideas and submit bids for up to £40,000 of funding.

For Q Exchange in 2024, we have £800,000 of funding for the programme. It is delivered by Q and jointly funded by the Health Foundation and NHS England.

Our collaborative online process supports you to refine and develop your project ideas with the help of the Q community.

The theme for Q Exchange this year is:

How can we improve across system boundaries?​

We are looking for proposals that involve two or more parts of the health and care system and focus on improving the quality and efficiency of the interface between different sectors. For example, care at home, primary care and the community sector.

Projects should relate to one or more of the following areas:​

  • Reducing waits sustainably and equitably​.
  • Increasing productivity and reducing waste.​
  • Boosting the culture, capabilities and structures needed for learning and improvement.
  • Embedding improvement into management systems and processes​.

We are looking for projects with potential for insights or interventions that are scalable. We expect proposals to show proactive links to local or national priorities and structures, as well as making active use of the Q community.

Improving productivity is an especially difficult but pressing challenge for the sector. Connecting your ideas to the holistic benefits you can achieve and showing the potential to inspire productivity gains alongside other objectives will be important to sustaining and spreading the work.

Project teams must be led by a Q member for the duration of the project but can involve people who are not yet part of the community.

In May 2024, we will announce the 30 shortlisted projects. Q members will then vote to choose the projects you want to see funded. We will announce the successful projects in June 2024.

Ideas have now been submitted and applicants are working to refine their ideas with your help. The final deadline for project proposals is Wednesday 20 March 2024.

£800,000 total funding available jointly from the Health Foundation and NHS England, it offers Q members the chance to develop project ideas and submit bids for up to £40,000 of funding

30 teams with collaboratively developed ideas, shortlisted for the Q community online vote

Q community members will vote online to decide which projects will receive funding

The Big Idea

Q Exchange aims to activate the knowledge of improvement experts across the UK; to create links between those leading work and those who can help champion, support, adopt these ideas; and to boost ideas that have the best potential to generate value for the health and care system

Collective wisdom

Involve people who understand improvement to develop and select projects. Support all involved to learn from evidence, emerging ideas, and each other

Community

Create links between those leading work and others who champion, support, and help adopt it

Impact

Boost ideas judged to have the best potential to generate insight and value for patients, staff, and the health and care system

The Timeline

  1. Calendar icon: FEB - 2024FEB2024

    Idea generation

    Upload your Q Exchange idea from 6 February 2024 and start to develop your idea with the support of the Q community.

  2. Calendar icon: MAR - 2024MAR2024

    Refine your idea

    Convert your idea into a proposal on the website by 12.00 on Wednesday 20 March 2024 for it to be considered by the shortlisting panels.

  3. Calendar icon: MAY - 2024MAY2024

    Shortlisting

    Shortlisting panels will assess proposals and select up to 30 projects to go forward to the vote. Shortlisted projects will be announced 15 May 2024.

  4. Calendar icon: MAY - 2024MAY2024

    Community vote

    Q members will vote online to decide which projects will receive funding. Winners will be announced in July 2024.

View the full timeline

Latest activity

  • Hi Sharon. Agreed - local engagement and ownership of any tests-of-change can make all the difference! Thanks very much for your message of support, much appreciated.
  • Hi Sahana Thank you for reaching out sounds like we have some great synergies across our projects!! I will send an email looking forward to hearing more about your project and potential collaborations.
  • Sounds like a great project. Strongly agree that in order to create effective partnership with patients and their carers we need to ensure knowledge and engagement is accessible - will be interested to see where this project takes you!!
  • Thanks Hayley for the support for the project and for the insightful questions. Learning objectives are: understanding  of the preterm optimisation bundle https://www.bapm.org/pages/perinatal-optimisation-pathway Consider the local challenges and opportunities faced by multi-professional teams seeking to optimise outcomes for preterm babies and support healthcare professionals to implement appropriate intervention in a timely manner And how to set up and facilitate high quality simulation. The time spent in the pre-brief and the debriefing are critical elements and allow the MTP team to have a discussion in a safe environment  and address the  multiple human factors that typically emerge in situations of high stress and which teams who do not regularly work and train together find very challenging. The workshops offer time and a safe friendly space for the team to reflect on both clinical and non technical skills  all of which play an important part in informing the successful management of preterm birth. Learning together across disciplines in a non hierarchical environment is a positive experience in our experiences to date. To address this part of your commentary: Also in terms of the evaluation, are there specific measures related to addressing disproportionately poor maternity outcomes including incidence of preterm birth for mothers and babies from minority ethnic backgrounds? This is a much broader question and not within the scope of the evaluation of this project . It is the subject of a much wider national debate to understand the reasons why outcomes are disproportionately worse for the population group you highlight. There are many national initiatives focussed on further research such as the NIHR who have launched a £50 m 'Challenge ' funding to tackle inequalities in  maternity care ; this is part of the Department of Health & Social Care 's women's health priorities for 2024. The consortium will include experts across the UK to specifically address the inequalities experienced by black and Asian women.
  • Guest
    This sounds like an exciting project. We (community nutrition and dietetics) have used healthcall successfully in community, to remotely monitor clients in 2 different settings so it will be interesting to see how it will be used here. I am happy to offer support from our learning.
  • Many congratulations that you have already undertaken a pilot and have evidence to this working well.  Videos that can be uploaded onto a platform are a great way to spread learning and the workshop to consolidate learning is beneficial. I like that idea of building a network of support for clinicians. Good luck with the venture which can only be of benefit to staff and patients alike.  
  • I love these questions!! I have my own personal view on this but wouldn't want to enforce this on others, or anchor anyone to what I'm thinking. I'm hoping that our kickstart meeting next month can begin to explore key questions you raised around "who is this for?" "how will it be used?", as well as agreeing how we hope to work over the next year or so. The question of "what do we mean by a system?" is complex - particularly as there is a lot of variation across the country. We're also lucky to collaborate with Irish Q members so they may have a wholly different perspective, as I suspect you might from an Independent Sector view. We'll find a way through this though as there is so much expertise in Q and so many people have volunteered to support this work already.

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