What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to your chosen theme?

North Wales is a beautiful rural area, encompassing Snowdonia National Park along with coastal towns and remote villages. Providing unscheduled and emergency ambulance services to the residential and tourist populations presents many unique challenges.

WAST are committed to building improvement capability and capacity, and continue to train Team Leader staff in Quality Improvement. As our ability to deliver innovation and design improvements improves, our challenge is the effective spread and scale through effective and engaging communication, across WAST staff groups and our partner organisations. This is important, as our previously time-based performance measures, are replaced by Quality Indicators – our improvement ecosystem must be responsive to ensure we are able to do the best we can for our patients.

Our project will enhance the capability of improvement across geographic boundaries of our organisation, and healthcare partners/staff groups that our services interact with, daily.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The aim of the project is to utilise innovative approaches to spread, share and scale improvement across our organisation, and working with partner organisations that our patients transition into.

The project will be measured through increased performance of our individual improvement project measures (the success of their spread/scale), and through the engagement of staff in the communication aspects of the project. This will be achieved through multiple approaches including social media analytics/video analytics and utilisation of the project’s outputs. The outcome measure for this project is to improve and sustain Quality Indicator performance.

The benefits are primarily the patient and their family using our services; this will be achieved through improvement in service delivered through our greatest asset, our people. By working across organisational boundaries, we expect definitive services (such as minor injury units/EDs) will enjoy benefits of improved performance.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will be lead through the project team and implementation lead. The project will be delivered in multiple ways, with a focus on technology connecting our experts, across the organisation and wider health economy, with our staff and stakeholders. Communication and building energy across #TeamWAST, in relation to improvement, is a fundamental to the project and essential for all healthcare organisations to master.

In recent years, the organisation has invested in developing clinical skills & clinical leadership, and growing opportunity for quality improvement. These key colleagues are core to the delivery of the project and are ideally positioned and trusted across staff groups to influence front-line change.

Our approach enables iterative learning through rapid learning cycles. Day-to-day, mitigation of risks will be achieved through our senior project team. The initial project area of North Wales will reduce organisational risk prior to scale up across regions.

What and how is your project going to share learning throughout?

Our project is focuses on sharing learning in pursuit of enhanced scale and spread. Naturally, colleagues, collaborative organisations, and Q members involved in our project will receive direct insight throughout the project lifecycle.

The wider organisation will receive updates and insight through our structures and evolving matrix style working. This ensure the smooth implementation of this work in other regions is possible, and encourages other external partners to engage.

Furthermore, the UK Ambulance networks continue to collaborate and share learning; an evolving focus on quality improvement in the context of our unique, geographically spread services provides a platform for shared learning – ensuring the influence of this project is UK wide.

The project team are keen to involve other Q members (particular those wishing to seeking to share specialist knowledge/insight across ambulance service staff groups), and share progress through the Ambulance Q special interest group.