Quality improvement, learning and sharing
What is quality improvement?
Quality improvement (QI) is about improving patient (and population) outcomes, system performance and professional development.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement have developed a model for improvement (MFI) which is one type of QI methodology. The MFI is being successfully adopted in many healthcare settings to improve patient care.
More than the methodology, QI is about a change in behaviours, working together, change coming from the bottom up, creative thinking, and fundamentally, using measurement to guide improvement.
QI is distinctly different to audit and has been shown to bring about more sustained improvement.
What is the model for improvement?
The model for improvement consists of the following three questions:
- What are we trying to accomplish?
- How will we know that a change is an improvement?
- What change can we make that will result in improvement?
Download our patient safety improvement plan.
Learning and sharing information
The Royal Free London signed up to the NHS England sign up to safety campaign in April 2015. We committed to deliver a detailed improvement plan through building strong organisational relationships and engaging clinical and non-clinical staff to work together for shared purpose. The patient safety programme have monthly collaborative meetings where clinical leads and safety champions come together to share learning and experiences around driving safety improvements.
As part of this work we are actively involved in our academic health science network, UCL Partners, safety collaborative, where we contribute to sharing and learning around safety issues, with many other organisations.