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

Since early 2021, MSEFT exec has approved a programme focusing on reducing health inequalities in the  population we serve. Our initial focus was to undertake an analysis of waiting list using all the protected characteristics we had data for. We worked with various specialties to understand the unwarranted variation in their specialty to develop action plans. one of the groups that had unwarranted variation across board was ‘working age women’. There is limited literature published on causes and remedies to reduce this inequity.

We have started engagement with this group (more than half of our staff are working age women!) but with covid, work/care pressures (asking working age women who don’t attend appointments to attend service user sessions!), this is a challenge. We are bringing together the worlds of improvement, digital, user-centered design etc to enable faster and better understanding of issues and hence wanted to ask for Q community’s support.

What does your project aim to achieve?

The aim of the work is to:

– Develop a set of hybrid tools (online and offline) that will help us engage with the various parts of the population using the expertise of local, regional and national experts

We hope by doing this we will be able to give frontline teams the capability to engage with communities to understand barriers to access of care and help improve equity of care

How will the project be delivered?

This project will be delivered as part of the Health inequalities programme which sits within MSEFT’s Chief Strategy and Improvement officer’s portfolio. This uses expertise of:

– Improvement science

– evidence review

– analytics/predictive modelling

– project/programme management

-clinical/community engagement

– evaluation methodology

and has strategic partnership with co-design experts, locally and nationally.

As this is part of our health-inequalities programme, we have board level sponsorship and involvement of various system partners from MSE Health and care partnership.

Through our health inequalities work so far, our approach has been to disseminate our learning via a toolkit e.g. we tested a Health inequalities deep dive framework on behalf of our system partners and helped develop a toolkit so that other partners could implement the approach.

We expect this project to deliver such a toolkit (for offline and online engagement) that can be used by any frontline team.

Use expertise within Q community to support this project

How is your project going to share learning?

We propose to use the local, regional and national expertise to develop a hybrid toolkit that can be used by any frontline team seeking to engage specific groups to understand barriers to access and make changes in the service to improve them.

We will make this toolkit available on our website, Q community and through various other communities so that it can be used by anyone in need of tools for engaging various communities in a hybrid way.

We will also develop a expert Q community group to support in development of this toolkit which will then create avenues for further dissemination

We will use a learning-lab like methodology to continuously test and further develop the toolkit. this will also involve co-design experts and innovators which will further help spread the work. MSEFT is partner in NHS Clinical Entrepreneur programme, runs local innovation programme which gives further spread opportunities.