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?​

Patients receive care across multiple organisations, and we know that the pathways are often fragmented and difficult to navigate. Many improvement training offers are organisation specific and don’t provide the opportunity for services and their system partners to work together on an equal footing. They often also only have limited input from patients and others who experience their services. Quality Improvement is the primary focus, and co-production more of a ‘nice to have’.

This programme will have make co-production central to improvement – with patients working along side those in health, care and voluntary sectors to design a package of training that can be co-delivered. The underpinning principle is that by learning together and testing new ideas, collaboration between sectors will be enhanced, with a central patient voice. It will also enable the growth of a network of ‘patient- trainers’ to continue to work across sectors to drive improvement.

What does your project aim to achieve?

–       Build relationships via joint learning across sectors and care pathways

–       Understanding whole care pathways and how these are experienced by those who use them, and particularly how they can be challenging (including for those who are more seldom heard).

–       Joint approaches to cross sector improvement, led by patient trainers

–       Growth of a regional network of patient improvement trainers, as well as  health and care staff who have the mindset and passion to co-produce improvements that work for their communities.

How will the project be delivered?

We have been running a team based co-production for improvement programme for the past year, co-designed and delivered with a range of patients. It has been very well received. We will use learning from this to extend the concept to a number of care pathways that involve different sectors (NHS, ICB, Local Authority, Voluntary Sector) and develop a joint programme.

A working group will identify joint teams to trial the approach, and co-produce a training programme that will be delivered alongside facilitation of projects. We will work with our ICB, to break down traditional commissioner; provider barriers and to identify pathways which would benefit from a collective improvement approach.

The project will, learning as we go, and develop a resources to support others to adopt this approach. It will involve NHS and non NHS Improvement specialists and Participation leads, as well as service users of each sector.

How is your project going to share learning?

We will share ongoing learning through case studies and blogs from the working group co-designing experience and from those on the programme.

By the end of the project, we will have a suite of online resources and case studies that will be made freely available to the Q community.