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'?

This project will address the challenge staff have of knowing whether they are successfully delivering quality care, from the moment service users are on the waiting list. Including learning from what is going right, understanding what needs changing and considerations for future business planning.

Mental Health Trusts provide a variety of services, including specialist services. These are constantly improving to try and meet the increasing demand, but systems for monitoring the impact are rarely co-produced with staff and service users.

We can only understand if quality of care is improving if we use the right data to monitor this, we can only ensure we have the right data by asking staff and service users “What matters to you?” to understand what quality care looks like. This links with the IHI’s “What matters to you?” movement led by Maureen Bisognano. (“What Matters to You?” – IHI).

What does your project aim to achieve?

This project aims to develop a co-produced Quality Framework that can be used by various mental health services to understand if they are providing quality care, with quality being co-defined by the service users and staff.

By co-producing this framework together, we can all help service users, staff and other services working with each other, to monitor how well service users are being supported and how services can support their staff and service users even better.

The project will help manage issues with access to services and waiting lists in a number of ways. Whilst specifics will be co-developed by staff and service users, the quality framework will aim to help services understand and achieve their outcomes more efficiently, ensure that service users and staff are satisfied with the service throughout the journey and make delivery of services more efficient. This should therefore improve flow.

How will the project be delivered?

The project will be delivered by testing with varied specialist mental health teams over a 12 month period. Each of the teams will be made up of managers, frontline clinicians and service users from each area.

In the first 6 months there will be 3 teams to test the quality framework, these will be three teams that have already been doing work to improve quality over the last year and have volunteered to test the framework, the teams include:

1)    The Community Enhancing Recovery Team (CERT)

2)    An older adults psychiatric ward.

3)    The Early Intervention Service.

Based on the learning of the first 6 months a further 3 teams will be chosen in the second 6 month period. The teams above will buddy with the 3 additional teams.

How is your project going to share learning?

The project will be led by an expert faculty with executive sponsorship from the Director of Nursing and Quality. This faculty includes colleagues with various expertise including quality improvement, quality assurance, performance analytics, clinical effectiveness and clinical and lived experience.

Each expert faculty member will support the dissemination of the work, through various routes including committee meetings, the QI forum, lived experience forums and the Trust’s Research and Quality Showcase in 2024. Learning has also been incorporated into the design of the project through the buddy system. Teams testing in the first 6 months can support the teams testing in the final 6 months.

Updates will be shared through the Q website and social media regularly. The Trust has a strong social media following on Twitter and Instagram, and has recently joined TikTok all of which have following form service users, therefore, all communications will be developed to be accessible and avoid jargon.