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

Ambulance services are uniquely positioned to improve health and care for our patients, and determine their experience of the healthcare journey. The ability and contribution of ambulance services to improve the wider urgent & emergency care system has led to high activity in improvement initiatives, projects, and programmes across the UK.

In recent years, Quality Improvement has empowered frontline colleagues to significantly contribute to making improvement happen. Yet, across the UK ambulance services there remains variance in improvement capabilities & capacity, and challenges in effectively scale, spread and transition of improvement ideas.

The project will build improvement capability and awareness across specialist and frontline ambulance staff groups, whilst operating across UK Ambulance Service boundaries.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The Q Exchange funding will aim to achieve two goals:

Spread awareness and engagement across frontline ambulance staff, in improvement opportunities and initiatives, and the Ambulance Q network.

This will provide benefit to frontline staff in being able to make change happen at the frontline. This can be measured through NHS staff questionnaire responses (related to ability to influence change at work); measured at service level through staff interactions & engagements, and through increased activity & membership of the Ambulance Q special interest group.

As the Ambulance Q community, establish and develop UK-wide collaborative work streams that create wide-spread improvement and an environment to tackle shared challenges collaboratively.

This will benefit patients and service users through service developments, seeking to ensure effective, safe, and positive patient experiences. This can be measured through the growth in collaborative work streams, joint-working initiatives and projects.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will be delivered through the collaboration of the Ambulance Q community, and associated colleagues involved in ongoing collaborations. The Ambulance Q group have established a coherent and passionate group, keen and able to progress this project. Through the Ambulance Q group, Q members are encouraged to actively participate in the project delivery; whilst other specialist members may wish to contribute to specific improvement project work streams.

The project will be delivered through the co-ordination and facilitation of frontline ambulance staff ‘exchanges’. This will enable shared learning and experience of contrasting organisations. Secondly, a conference will be held focusing on shared learning & future collaborations in improvement areas. Finally, the project will spread key messages and learning across UK ambulance staff through the use of video-cast, pod-casts, and other digital & media tools – ensuring improvement messages can be shared UK wide.

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

The Ambulance Q community is a collaborative group able to coordinate and share learning into the wider UK ambulance organisations. This will complement traditional means of sharing learning throughout the project life cycle.

In addition to this, the proposal ensures sharing experience, initiatives and learning is fundamental to achieving the project aim. Our ambitions to create a system of sharing digitally, using engaging visual-audio media to spread messages across the UK ambulance sector.

Finally, the project will be evaluated and the learning shared across the Q community and other interested parties.