What is the challenge your project is going to address and how does it connect to the theme of 'How can we improve across system boundaries?​

The use of QI to improve healthcare has been encouraged at national and international scales, and is being implemented into the NHS and healthcare degree curriculums. However, despite being a key stakeholder in health and social care delivery, there is a lack of evidence regarding the adoption and support of QI in the Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprise (VCSE) sector. This sector is particularly fundamental for improving mental health as many people suffering from mental health issues are more likely to trust VCSE members than healthcare professionals, particularly in underrepresented communities such as the black community, where support for improving mental health from the community is crucial . Additionally, we consistently see access to QI training and projects being dominated by senior NHS staff, with a underrepresentation of staff in bands 2-5. We want to ensure QI skills are accessible for ALL improving care across different levels in healthcare and VCSE organisations.

What does your project aim to achieve?

QI courses and academies can often be very expensive, particularly for VCSE organisations. Furthermore, it can be very dependent on senior leaders whether frontline staff and workers are supported to attend such training, and patients are rarely included in training or improvement projects. This impedes improvements occurring and QI skills spreading. We want to address this using our experience using QI with VCSE organisations and make QI skills accessible for more people, leading to more improvement where it is needed most. We aim to develop an improvement academy open to applications from all VCSE teams, NHS Trusts and patients that specifically focuses on improving mental health in the city of Sheffield. This can include initiatives that are already underway that could be improved using QI methodology, but also new ideas. We would like to support 5 teams from across the city intensively through a competitive application process.

How will the project be delivered?

This project will be delivered through a supportive application process where the academy will be advertised across the city and teams can apply using a simple form. The shortlisted teams will go through an informal interview process with a panel of QI professionals, healthcare professionals, lived experience members and carers.

The successful 5 teams will be part of a 12 month academy which will include teaching from renowned experts from other VCSE groups, universities and national organisations on quality improvement, measurement, bid writing and dissemination.

There will be 3 learning sessions across the year and a celebration event at the end. The timeline outlines the Learning Sessions that will be held.

The teams will include a maximum of 5 people, and must include at least one person with lived experience (which has been costed in the budget) and a mixture of people from VCSE and healthcare organisations.

How is your project going to share learning?

One of the main purposes of the academy is to support teams to better monitor their improvements and disseminate their work. We know more established VCSE teams are better at this, and we want to level the playing field and give everyone an opportunity to have support with their ideas.

We would like to publish learning from the work, which we will aim to do in BMJ Quality Open, using our Q membership discount and will submit learning from the work to various events including local events – like VCSE annual general members meetings, but also national and international events such as conferences.