By Maggie Herbert and Cheryl Guest, NHS England and NHS Improvement Digital Education team
Quality improvement (QI) is playing a vital role in enhancing health and care services today. The NHS Long Term Plan (p.111) argues that QI is “an evidence-based approach for improving every aspect of how the NHS operates.” Yet, there’s no single agreed way of driving QI.
Digital education has become all the more important in QI in recent years, as pressurised staff require increasingly flexible ways of accessing learning and gaining new skills. At NHS England and NHS Improvement, we’re passionate about the potential that digital education has for driving improvements right across health and care, giving people the opportunity to learn in new ways, at a time and a pace that is convenient for them.
We’ve developed a suite of products to help individuals and teams develop their improvement skills in ways that suit them. All of them are completely free to access:
Improvement Fundamentals – an award-nominated and CPD-accredited programme of online, self-directed mini-courses in QI for those involved in heath or social care services.
Improvement Fundamentals in a Day – a toolkit designed to provide all the resources you need to run your own local QI workshop, without requiring any improvement expertise yourself.
FolksLab Toolkit – FolksLab is a proven method to help organisations and teams to identify new solutions to specific problems in a way that is rapid, creative and accessible, removing barriers to participation. Our toolkit is based on experiences of delivering FolksLab workshops specifically in NHS and health and care settings.
MOOC School – a series of two-and-a-half hour webinars sharing best practice guiding you through how you can go about setting up your own online course.
We were really excited recently to hear that Improvement Fundamentals has been nominated in the Training Journal (TJ) Awards 2019 in the Best Public Sector/Not-for-Profit Programme category (the winners will be announced on 3rd December – wish us luck!). The course has proven to be of real value to people working right across health and care, including in clinical audit. Marina Otley, Clinical Audit Specialist at Nottingham CityCare Partnership, took part in our 2015 version of the programme. In a blog for the NHS England website, she said, “One year on, the legacy from doing the course has been that the workplace challenge has led to changes in the way we do clinical audit projects in the organisation with an emphasis on involving patients and carers and the use of other quality improvement tools.”
The Clinical Audit Support Centre have been really enthusiastic participants in Improvement Fundamentals. They also helped us to organise a tweet chat on the topic of clinical audit last year. We’re really grateful to them for their help and support. This Clinical Audit Awareness Week (#CAAW2019), why not give any of our offers a go and see if they can help you drive improvements in your workplace?
If you’d like to get in touch with us about any of our products, please email us at england.si-mooc@nhs.net.