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Growing the next generation: working together to support students

Working together to support the next generation of improvers: what works in practice for students and newly qualified professionals.

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  • Idea
  • 2019

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

Improvement skills are a recognised mechanism to improve outcomes and deliver efficiencies across the public sector but they rely on a skilled workforce.

Educational providers are incorporating improvement into health and social care curricula. There is increasing evidence that work-based learning experiences enhance students’ skills and knowledge, contribute towards improved outcomes and deliver benefits for employers.  Many members of Q may be involved in these activities. But, creating these opportunities is not simple. Challenges include too few academic/clinical mentors, clarity about the expectations of students, educators and employers, pressures on service delivery and timetabling/curriculum.

New professionals may find themselves in an environment that does not yet recognise QI skills. In these circumstances, they may find it difficult to continue to apply and practice their skills, which would undermine the investment made in their pre-registration training.

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project intends to influence the future delivery of QI education for pre-registration students; and to identify key aspects of successful support for newly qualified professionals who have improvement skills.

The Q community is a wonderfully diverse network with members who work within higher education, members who support professional education within employing organisations, and members who have pivotal policy roles with professional bodies. Bringing together these members with others beyond the Q Community will bring multiple perspectives across boundaries to the current discussion.

We think this project will directly help Q members who are involved (or asked to get involved) in student education, and potentially generate ideas about widening and extending Q membership in the future to support career-long delivery of improvement projects.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will draw upon a range of academic skills and disciplines within and beyond healthcare and education, i.e. behaviour change, design and engineering and use the double diamond design process to maximise engagement. Q members will be crucial partners.

Discover – online exercises will facilitate the capture of conversations to provide deeper insights into the complexities of developing workforce improvement capacity and capability. The learning will be refined to pose relevant questions and generating meaningful discussions during workshops.

Define and Develop – the new knowledge from the Discovery phase, will be the focus of the next phase to refine the experience of employers in supporting student learning and newly qualified professionals in practice.

The Deliver phase will focus on translating new knowledge into practical action and therefore participants will be asked to identify realistic solutions and pledge key actions that enable them to move the agenda forward.

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

Our approach to sharing learning will occur during the project and afterwards. Our preferred methods will enable contributors to take learning from every engagement. And we will supplement the final report with easily digested summaries of the solutions to delivering improvement education and other key findings. These will be contextualised appropriately to ensure that the outputs can applied to practice, research, education and policy and include a variety of approaches aimed at non-academic partners and policy makers, i.e. summary reports, infographics, videos/podcasts.

The extended network produced as a result of the programme will provide broader collaboration opportunities.

Recognising the interest in this subject, applications to relevant international and national conferences to present findings will be submitted.

How you can contribute

  • Highlighting existing examples of student or newly qualified improvement capability?
  • Who is involved in pre-registration improvement training?
  • What would make this really useful for you or your local community?

Comments

  1. I really like this proposal - students entering the health and social care system have a wealth of enthusiasm and ideas for improvement, but often very few contacts to follow through. A leg up in the process is a nice idea with high impact potential.

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