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

In North West Surrey (NWS) there is an Integrated Health and Care Partnership (ICP) established. The focus in 2019/20 is to deliver a new Model of Care.

The challenge is to implement these new models of care, so they result in improvement. Initial conversations among partner organisations has identified that the workforce need support to develop improvement capacity and capability, to equip them to achieve this.

There are 11 partner organisations and 40 GP practices in the NWS ICP. Some have a process in place for building improvement capability, others do not.

The organisations that do provide training, mentoring and coaching in Quality Improvement (QI) all do so with a focus on how to make improvement happen within their individual organisations. An initial exploration shows how approaches are all aligned to the Model for Improvement methodology, so there is potential to work across partner organisations, to develop improvement capability across the organisational boundaries.

What does your project aim to achieve?

To bring QI leaders from partner organisations together to design and deliver an approach to building quality improvement capability across organisational boundaries.

To design a tiered approach which enables three levels of QI capability-building to emerge:

• Learn: for those who are becoming aware of, and learning about QI for the first time
• Live: for those who have learned QI and are applying it in practice
• Lead: for those who teach, coach or mentor others to develop and apply QI

The benefit will be to grow the capacity for QI across NWS and enable those with QI capability to support the delivery of the new model of care, as an active community of practice.

The measures will include:

• Numbers in each of the three tiers (learn, live, lead)
• Numbers who attend training
• Number of projects led by the community of practice
• Outcome data and cumulative impact assessment from model of care projects
• A measure of the self-sustainability of the QI community in NWS

How will the project be delivered?

QI leaders from partner organisations in NWS have met to share their knowledge and insights and discuss co-designing the best approach for NWS. This will prevent duplication of effort by individual organisations, and identify any gaps that partner organisations can support each other with.

In addition, all Q members in NWS will be invited to help design the approach, and form the QI leaders’ tier.

There will be sharing sessions held throughout the year which will include formal training opportunities across the “live, learn, lead” levels. In this way we will collaborate across the system to enable the workforce to grow their improvement capability. This will be from basic QI skills to masterclass level, depending on where individuals are at in their QI journey.

The Partnership Board of the North West Surrey Integrated Care Partnership have signed off a system-wide approach to change, so this project comes with executive support.

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

The project will include sharing events at regular intervals, with a particular focus on sharing what has been learned about leading QI activities across organisational boundaries.

The project team will share locally with the NWS ICP delivery board, as well as within their organisations and also nationally with the relevant Q SIGs. There will also be opportunities for project team members to share with their professional networks, for example the NHS Do OD network (NHS Employers and NHS Leadership Academy) and the NHS Elect QI network.