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NHS IMPACT (Improving Patient Care Together) has recently launched to support the NHS at every level to promote and deliver continuous improvement.
The aim is:
To mainstream continuous improvement across the NHS to improve patient outcomes, increase operational efficiency and achieve overall excellence in healthcare delivery.
In the world of improvement, we know that there are many models of improvement methodology, but they all share key values.
This single approach, to be applied across multiple organisations and systems has been tried before, but this approach hits slightly differently.
The five components of NHS IMPACT underpin a systematic approach to deliver better care for patients and the wider communities.
The Five components are:
1. Building a shared purpose and vision
2. Investing in people and culture
3. Developing leadership behaviours
4. Building improvement capability and capacity
5. Embedding improvement into management systems and processes
The driver diagram below (aligned to these above 5 components) identifies the secondary drivers which are the opportunities for change across the system.
When these 5 components are used across systems, the Theory of change is undeniable:
If we … adopt quality improvement as the primary method for addressing challenges.
We will … create optimum conditions for continuous improvement and high performance.
So that … we can provide high quality health and care services that meet the evolving needs.
The result is a wealth of opportunity for continuous improvement across all partners.
How using Life QI can support NHS IMPACT
Life QI supports an organisation-wide approach to improvement. So used effectively it has shown to be a huge enabler for improving patient care. The five components of NHS IMPACT outline many outcomes, many of which Life QI can support, as outlined here.
1. Building a shared vision and purpose
The flexibility and the transparency of Life QI allows partners to work together and collaborate on key themes and showcase their organisational priorities on their profile page. QI projects can then be linked to these organisational priorities and highlighted on dashboards for effective governance that support the realisation of the shared vision and purpose.
2. Investing in people and culture
By providing teams with the software and freedom to work on issues that matter to them, you are demonstrating your investment in staff and empowering them to improve their work. This investment is further showcased by the number of projects staff are running and the impact they are making with them.
Working closely with teams, QI projects can be focused on staff related issues such as Joy in Work - empowering teams to work together to generate solutions to restore joy and wellbeing in the workforce.
3. Developing leadership behaviours
Life QI allows leaders to evidence how they are sponsoring or coaching projects, and highlights QI progress and activity information to inform leaders and their decision-making processes. The software provides leaders with a space to empower their teams to improve each area of the organisation and validate the impact of their work.
4. Building improvement capability and capacity
Many organisations use Life QI to assist in delivering QI training. It is ideal for those learning QI methods and tools to run a real project in a learning environment. Furthermore, it acts as your database of improvers and what projects they are working on, allowing you to quantify your capacity for improvement across your staff base. Similarly, the project database allows you to quantify and monitor your capability and where you hot/ cold spots and key themes are by department.
5. Embedding into management systems and processes
Life QI allows organisations to efficiently organise their QI work aligning it their overarching priorities and vision. We see best practice here when the use of dashboards become integral to the governance of each department/division with each of these leads taking ownership of their improvement work – reviewing it and managing from the real-time dashboards outlining activity and impact metrics.
We have also seen Life QI become an important decision-making tool for improvement ideas facilitating the evaluation and approval processes before moving to the project stage.
In summary, the use of Life QI will undoubtably support a holistic approach to continuous improvement by working together to deliver against the NHS IMPACT framework.
If you would like to know more about how Life QI can support your organisation with the NHS IMPACT framework, please contact your Customer Success Manager who will be happy to provide guidance and advice on the use and best practice models.
