Leeds Teaching Hospitals launches national exemplar project to get more citizens involved in improving patient care

NHS Citizen-funded project now open to applications

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has been awarded funding from NHS Citizen to deliver an exemplar quality improvement project and members of the public are being asked to get involved.

The QI Partners project aims to support people with nationally recognised training and support to become an integral part of quality improvement teams at the Trust.

QI Partners will represent patients, carers and relatives on a range of ‘QI Collaboratives’. These are teams of clinical, non-clinical and managerial staff with a passion for making patient care better that work together in a focused way to achieve a specific improvement goal.

Partners will bring with them a wealth of experiences and skills. They will advocate for the changes that will make the most difference to patients’ quality of care and experience. In return, QI Partners can look forward to participating in comprehensive QI training and to working with highly skilled and experienced clinical and managerial teams with a passion for quality improvement.

Improving quality is about making healthcare safer, effective, patient-centred, timely, efficient and equitable.  QI is a systematic way of doing this using evidence-based processes and characteristics that can be measured, analysed, improved and controlled.

Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust has an excellent national reputation for delivering quality improvement programmes with demonstrable outcomes for patients:

• The Parkinson’s QI Collaborative won a coveted HSJ Patient Safety Award for work to improve the quality of care for inpatients with Parkinson’s, encouraging self-medication and reducing readmission rates.
   
• The Falls QI Collaborative also won a HSJ Patient Safety Award for reducing the numbers of patients falling whilst in hospital by 26 per cent (per 1000 bed days).

• The Trust’s work is recognised nationally by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in their publication “Quality improvement in hospital trusts: Sharing learning from trusts on a journey of QI” (September 2018) 

Dr Anna Winfield, Patient Safety and Quality Manager and Elderly Medicine Specialty Doctor, says: “We have seen the benefits that a carer made to the care of patients with Parkinson’s disease at Leeds. They joined the QI faculty aiming to improve timely administration of Parkinson’s medications and provided a unique insight into the challenges patients experience when this does not happen.

“The success of this work was not only a statistically significant improvement in timely delivery of medications but staff gained a better appreciation of challenges experienced by patients with this condition.

“The potential impact of involving patients across our QI faculties is huge and will improve patient care and experience.”

QI Partners will be given quality improvement training and support to develop a wide range of personal and professional skills, making it a fantastic opportunity for businesses that are looking to upskill members of their workforce.

To find out more and apply for a role visit The Leeds Teaching Hospitals website