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

Do things stop you giving great care? Does this frustrate you? Can you do something about it? This final question is where often QI fits in, but for people new to QI, getting started is often quoted as the hardest part. Despite traditional modes of capability building, the pandemic has necessitated a disruptive change to the delivery of education with 53% of all new educational development initiatives being transferred to an online delivery system.

Feedback from face-to-face and virtual workshops with hundreds of medical trainees suggested a QI-resource gap for easy to access, on demand, digestible digital materials which allow learning in a less structured environment.  There are materials available covering different QI-topics online nonetheless, there is no clear overarching process for improvement shared; leaving learners to make sense of the loosely connected set of resources available. We aim to teach an improvement process using a more immersive and gamified storyline.

What does your project aim to achieve?

We aim to develop a series of online-linked tutorials, accessible anytime by anyone which will teach a process for solving a problem rather than teaching unconnected principles and tools. All of this will be done through an adventure-based storyline to allow a deeper learner experience, complementing more formal QI teaching.

This access to standardised materials through bite-sized videos, will begin to “raise the floor” of QI capability for medical trainees, ensuring that they are able to support their own self-learning and self-development. This will help enhance the learners experience when they attend other facilitated sessions or participating in mentor-supported projects.

There will be an emphasis on the hidden curriculum items such as the importance of teamwork, communicating your QI work and the common pitfalls when you start. Furthermore, there will be some guidance and signposting to educational curricula and sign off for improvement at end of year ARCP for trainees.

How will the project be delivered?

We will use a QI approach to deliver the project at hand:

Understand:

• Gather further feedback from medical trainees on requirements of QI training to ensure the user requirements are suitable.

Design:

• Identify a digital partner to support creation of tutorials.
• Design an initial set of 8-10 linked video tutorials over a 12-month period covering QI topics using an adventure island story telling theme. This will not be an exhaustive set of videos in the first instance; part of the project will be about signposting trainees to resources and further reading that address initial knowledge gaps.

Deliver:

• Evaluate the impact of the initial set of video animations through user group feedback to inform content development and future direction

Sustain:

• Widely disseminate findings of the pilot on Q Exchange, RCP Medical Care – Driving Change portal, and other education and quality improvement forums

How is your project going to share learning?

We endeavor to share learning through the Q Community website, especially through the ‘virtual learning’ special interest groups, as well as by presenting our work at improvement & educational forums and conferences including the RCP M conference 2023.

In addition, we aim to utilise social media such as #QITwitter to share the learning as well as the outputs from the project. The evaluation of the tutorials will form the basis of a journal article which also be written up in a medical educational journal.

Once this has been tested with medical trainees, the aim is to iterate the content over time to reach a wider audience