What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can improvement be used to reduce delays accessing health and care services'?

National Clinical Audits (NCA) provide insight into many aspects of quality of care, including  access, continuity, flow and inequalities.

The impact of local quality improvement plans in response to NCAs can be maximised though;

·       effective framing of the recommendations for local action

·       supporting effective collaboration of teams across patient pathways for whole pathway improvement

·       timely sharing of NCA intelligence, and increased frequency of data

·       shared learning and collaborative development of improvement plans

This project builds on a previous Q project which introduced the National Clinical Audit Benchmarking tool, which successfully provided an interactive dashboard for national clinical audit data.

We aim to support ICBs to achieve a greater level of impact by addressing:

·       a lack of aggregated NCA data reports, bespoke to each ICS footprint

·       the absence of good practice models/templates to support the collaborative exploration of insights and development of improvement plans

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project will work with an ICB to design and implement a best-practice method for using ICS-wide NCA data to improve delays to access, reduce inequalities and improve quality of care.

Regional organisations will be convened for collaborative problem-solving, informed by a new ICB insight report – based upon clinical audit and outcomes data.

We aim to:

·       provide an informative ‘Insight Report’ from which local leaders can co-design the improvement work needed around a given clinical focus

·       encourage the development of strong collaborative relationships and the ongoing use of systemwide clinical audit data to drive improvement

·       develop a template with potential for scaling up and/or application to other specialities / other ICS’

and as a result achieve across the ICS footprint:

·       A higher level of engagement with national audits

·       Improved results in future audits of the focus area

·       Improvement in linked outcomes such as delays, access and clinical outcomes

How will the project be delivered?

Initial scoping with the ICB, and local clinical audit leads, will allow agreement of the specialty of focus based on local need / areas of clear opportunity for improvement.

HQIP will develop a bespoke Insight Report using national clinical audit and outcomes data for that ICB, to include national benchmarks, regional variation, positive/negative outliers and trends. The report will incorporate key principles of measurement for improvement, and the evidence of how best to trigger local improvement from national audits.

Participating organisations will then:

·       review the report and add further local context/insight around the topic

·       convene for a facilitated session to discuss the ICS-wide picture, and agree actions going forward. Aspects of QI upskilling will be built into this session to support effective collaborative problem-solving/ relationship building.

An evaluation will be undertaken of the use of the insight report, the facilitated session and the improvement activities undertaken by participating organisations.

How is your project going to share learning?

The facilitated session will provide a significant opportunity for local learning and sharing. The project will also result in a tested methodology for utilising ICB -level intelligence from NCA data, and prompting improvement activity in a participative way.

During the project we will work with:

• the clinical audit SIG
• a bespoke discussion group for Q to provide input into the model developed to aide scalability

We would propose to share the learning as follows:

·       Evaluation report / sharing event for the identified ICS

·       Publication of a case study outlining the methods used and lessons learned for sharing with both the Q Community, and all NHS organisation clinical audit teams via the national body for local clinical audit (N-QI-CAN).