Our vision is to provide an interactive platform where members of primary care teams can sign up to be members and share ideas, discuss challenges and find inspiration for their improvement ideas. We would like this platform to be sustainable in the long-term and require minimum administration.

We have been working with a number of Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) over the last 18 months, supporting them to run QI Collaboratives across their localities to help build QI capacity and capability. The collaboratives focused on improving local clinical priorities, such as diabetes, atrial fibrillation and hypertension. The participating practices were supported by local GPs and Practice Managers (all listed below under ‘Others in team’), who were trained by UCLPartners to become QI champions, to provide guidance and support with all aspects of their QI projects.

The collaboratives have now concluded, but there is significant interest from the Sustainability and Transformation Partnerships (STPs), CCGs and the local QI leads to keep the momentum of this culture of improvement going and ensure there is sustainable infrastructure to support the QI priorities for the region. The QI champions are a hugely valuable asset to the STPs, CCGs and networks and are instrumental in helping build on the success of the QI collaboratives supported by UCLPartners. However, given the nature of primary care, where these local leads are not collocated and do not get the opportunity to meet very often, we believe an online forum is a good way to connect them and encourage collaboration.

We propose to create a network for the local QI champions who have been through our programme, to provide a community of peer support, inspiration and guidance for each other and their wider teams on all aspects of QI in primary care. We have tested the idea with the local leads, and all are very supportive and keen to establish such a forum and have made some suggestions for how it could be run.

Although our local QI leads are all signed up on LifeQI- the online platform for improvement projects- we know they would like more than just project support from an online community. We envisage a platform where peers and experts can contribute and enrich the discussions around how they can collectively mobilise their localities to make improvement part of everyday life.

We have considered a number of online collaboration tools for our purposes, and the one that meets our requirements and has received good reviews is Slack https://slack.com/features

Slack is an online collaboration hub that brings people and information together to help achieve their work objectives. It is intuitive to use and has been received well by members of some of our other programmes. It is an invitation-only hub, so any interested users would have to be recommended by one of the existing users (i.e. the local QI leads), or the administrator from UCLPartners.

The free version of this tool has limited features, such as storage space for documents, limited number of searchable messages and only one-on-one access to voice and video calls. The standard subscription, which costs £5.25 per active user per month (billed annually) provides unlimited message search, 10GB of file storage per person and allows voice and video calls for up to 15 members at a time, plus more.

We think providing this tool for up to 50 users for a three-year period can help establish a much-needed network and collaboration platform for primary care staff involved in doing QI work, who may often feel isolated from other colleagues doing similar work at either practice or locality level.