An overview of NELFT's attendance at the 2024 International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare hosted by the British Medical Journey in partnership with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in London.

Our reflections

Those who attended the forum from NELFT has since reflected on their time at the forum and the overall feedback has been how much they learnt and took away from the forum.

Feedback includes larger picture observations such as how incredible it was to see such a diversity of backgrounds, nationalities, professions etc. all with the common aim of improving patient outcomes, embracing the tools and methodology quality improvement provides to help achieve this goal. Down to more specific aspects of the conference such as Amy Edmondson talking about the importance of psychological safety and kindness within healthcare (view this session here).

Not only did staff learn about quality improvement, but also about how tools and techniques from other methodologies (such as behaviour change) can impact and inform improvement work to ultimately achieve the goal of improving patient outcomes. Using these tools and other resources needs to be embraced and encouraged to form a cohesive and holistic healthcare. For example, Rizwana Dhudia (Lead Pharmacist for those with Learning Disabilities and Autism), commented how many more resources there are available for those with autism when it comes to healthcare services and how she could use these and health inequalities data to further improve her work (view Rizwana’s presentation here).

The forum highlighted the importance of sharing improvement work with colleagues across healthcare, sessions such as the Conversation Café on Learning to Fail helped staff celebrate success and learn from failure and how to move forward. Other staff said that they were able to learn about different data collection techniques from speaking to others, as well as hearing about different platforms and programmes that can be use to aid improvement work.

When asked who did staff feel could benefit from attending the forum in the future the resounding response was “anyone lucky enough to go”. And without a doubt this statement couldn’t be truer. Of course attending a forum of this size requires committing various resources from time to finance, but what is often said about improvement work is that the time/resources it requires, will be earnt back ten fold in the improvements to processes, resource allocation, interventions and ultimately patient outcomes. As such, moving forward NELFT Quality Improvement Services will continue to share, celebrate and learn from improvement work across the Trust and wider healthcare systems and would encourage all staff do the same within their teams and services.

We hope that this page will help in this aim of sharing, celebrating and learning from improvement work via providing an overview of the wider forum, as well as NELFT’s participation within the forum.

About the forum

This international forum brought together over 5000 improvers, with over 250 speakers, representing over 60 countries, for three days of sharing, learning from and celebrating quality improvement across healthcare, focusing on the theme of 'Together to Regenerate Healthcare'.

The team behind the forum have compiled a wide range of videos, photos and interviews about the day which you can find below.

• Watch on-demand all the  keynotes  from London
• See the  photos  from the conference
• Revisit the  Twitter/X feed  and connect to others
• Follow us  on Twitter/X
• Watch 20+  short interviews  with speakers and attendees, recorded by the   Beyond the Room team   in London

For further information about the forum please visit: International Forum London 2024: 10-12 April 2024 (bmj.com)

NELFT QI Projects Presented

1. Improving the Overall Quality of Medication Reviews that form Part of the Annual Health Check for Patients with Learning Disabilities (presented by Rizwana Dhudia)

• Improving the Overall Quality of Medication Reviews that form Part of the Annual Health Check for Patients with Learning Disabilities
• View recording of presentation here.  

2. "One Voice": Bringing the Hospital Home Post Laryngectomy (Presented by Rhiannon Haag)

• One Voice - Bringing the Hospital Home Post Larygectomy
• View a previous recording of Rhiannon presenting this project here.

3. "One Voice": the Highs and Lows of Co-Production (Presented by Clare Linger)

• One Voice - The Highs and Lows of Coproduction
• View a previous recording of Clare presenting this project here.

4. Reducing Restrictive Practice (Presented by Caroline Okworu)

• Reducing restrictive practice
• View a previous recording of Caroline presenting this project here.

Mirek Skrypak (Director of Quality Improvement) presentation

Mirek Skrypak (Director of Quality Improvement at NELFT) also hosted a session on: Less is more: leadership insights and behavioural interventions for continuous improvement

Everyone knows that exercising and eating a healthy diet is good for you but for various reasons we don't fully commit, cannot sustain or prioritise a healthy lifestyle and other things get in the way. Since 2016 we at NELFT have been striving to be a continuously improving organisation but just like with exercising and keeping a healthy diet it is challenging. Following an opportunity to review our complex organisation, we have reset and used the Capability, Opportunity and Motivation for behaviour change (COM-B) model to prime our quality improvement approach to enable healthcare staff and users of service focus on continuous improvement. We shared our approach as well as learned from other during the session where there were lots of similarities.

  The learning objectives were:

1. How to support organisational priorities such as patient outcomes, experience, staff health and wellbeing, whilst adding value  as a partner within the system
2. How to collaborate with organisational departments eg innovation/transformation/clinical audit
3. Understand real-world application of COM-B model to drive QI strategy and measure impact
4.  Have confidence in leading QI to create conditions for a management system to enable quality improvement

View Mirek's presentation: Less is more - leadership insights and behavioural interventions for continuous improvement