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How improvement can help during times of pressure: key resources

Discover resources that show how improvement approaches can help, even during times of service and workforce pressures.

Overview of resources

The NHS is facing unprecedented pressures. Improvement approaches can help leaders and their teams solve problems at pace, in ways that maintain a focus on quality of care, staff engagement and longer-term goals.

There are many publicly available resources that focus on improvement. These are referenced in a new long read by Q members, Six improvement lessons to apply as winter pressures bite’, published by NHS Confederation.

We would love to hear about further resources that you’ve found useful, so we can share these with others.

Winter pressures: how improvement can help

The well-evidenced principles of systems thinking and improvement help to address immediate pressures in a way that can be sustainable.

Penny Pereira, Q Managing Director and Q member Amar Shah, Chief Quality Officer at East London NHS Foundation Trust, suggest six lessons from improvement that can be applied to current challenges, in a sustainable way.

They argue that short term fixes can store up problems down the line or create unintended consequences. They also suggest an improvement approach can drive local autonomy and enable creative thinking, which can help to prevent burnout.

The full article by Penny Pereira and Amar Shah, Six improvement lessons to apply as winter pressures bite’, is published by NHS Confederation. A summary of resources that support each lesson’ is below.

Read the NHS Confederation report

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