What is the positive change that has emerged through new collaborations or partnerships during Covid-19 that your project is going to embed?

Following the successful launch of the EBC Toolkit in 2019, Professor John Clarkson and his team assessed the feedback that called for a training programme to extend the reach of the Toolkit to a wider audience.

During Covid-19 The Care Machine worked with healthcare professionals and the Nightingale Hospitals and witnessed the complexity of systems management as the crisis unfolded. In supporting the patient care pathway, we applied the EBC Toolkit to help address numerous challenges.

This led us to propose a collaborative partnership with John and his team, to deliver the EBC toolkit through a modular training initiative. We appreciate that not all healthcare professionals have had the opportunity to benefit from training and development in quality improvement processes.  Our objective is to build new collaborations and a framework for an EBC Academy to create a community to share learning, training, and continuous improvement in a virtual environment at scale.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The EBC Toolkit has already been developed and delivered to a broad cross-section of Healthcare Practitioners. We have participated in current training activities with two cohorts of Q Community members to explore diverse healthcare challenges.

Our proposal expands on this and outlines the training and delivery of the Toolkit within a formal accreditation system to bring together healthcare stakeholders. We propose to introduce an inclusive training structure for any parties seeking to deliver the Toolkit, which will apply and measure standards of delivery, values and costs, based on a continuous process improvement model.

Our objective is to ensure adoption of the EBC Toolkit System at scale, to deliver societal, economic and reputational value.

We recognise the value of collaboration and seek to align our working practices with the objectives of the Q Community and The Health Foundation.

How will the project be delivered?

The toolkit has been successfully delivered to a diverse range of organisations including NHS Wales, St Helens Council, KCL Clinical Engineering course and government departments including MHCLG and DfT. We will use feedback and outcomes from every session to inform and guide future training throughout the UK and beyond.

We will deliver the EBC training programme through an online learning platform, interactive live workshops and collaborative feedback sessions. We will ensure that any organisation or individual seeking to receive or deliver training will be able to contribute and share continuous improvement updates in a range of formats, including webinars, blogs and newsfeeds.

All members of the community will have the opportunity to contribute to the ongoing development of the toolkit. A Membership Assessment process will be designed to ensure any participants delivering training meet a consistent standard and demonstrate their continued commitment to the programme while mitigating any reputational risk.

How is your project going to share learning?

The Academy will be a community where Q members and other healthcare professionals can meet and access the freely available resources, engaging in discussion on quality implementation, process development and shared learning methodologies through a community-driven forum. The forum will enable members to create their own collaborations to question and explore challenges that emerge from the uncertainties of covid-19.

Members will be encouraged to create a culture of storytelling, to build an anthology of real-world case studies, which will provide insight into the application of the EBC toolkit and the value of using a systems approach.

We will actively publicise the training to an extensive range of organisations to ensure equality, diversity and inclusion, extending to Accelerators, Incubators, Local Economic Partnerships, MedTech organisations, entrepreneurs and existing training organisations looking to expand their range of services.