Improvement

Growing a culture of improvement and learning across Hampshire and Isle of Wight Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

We aim to equip our staff and those who work alongside us with confidence to identify improvement opportunities in their areas, and the ability to make those improvements; measuring and demonstrating the impact that they have on services and patient experience.

Embedding a culture of continuous improvement

Continuous Improvement at the Academy is an integrated, learning-system approach. We bring together the right people, methods and data so teams can reflect, test, learn and improve continuously. We help you to:

Understand how well you’re doing

Clinical Effectiveness - turn outcomes, variation and audit findings into clear insights for teams.

Stay up to date with the best evidence

Knowledge and Library Services - quick access to trusted research, guidelines and summaries to inform decisions.

Identify priorities and co-design changes

Quality Improvement a Co-production - choose where to focus, map processes, and plan small tests of change with people with lived experience.

Test in practice and measure impact

Evaluation, QI, Demand and Capacity - run PDSA cycles, track measures over time, understand flow and constraints, and learn what works.

Embed and spread what works

Implementation and Sustainability - standardise successful changes, build capability, and keep reviewing for the next improvement.

Learning and Improvement Loop

Our Learning and Improvement Loop (as seen below) is a continuous cycle that helps those we work with build the confidence to spot opportunities for improvement, test new ideas, and understand what really makes a difference.

By learning from what works, sharing insights, and using the best available evidence, we can make changes that have a lasting, positive impact on our services and on the experiences of the people who use them.

It’s really important that we can demonstrate how effective our services are. This means using a variety of data - including safety and quality measures, clinical audits and evaluations, outcomes, feedback, performance metrics, and staffing information - to see what’s working well and where there might be opportunities for improvement. By gathering and examining this evidence, teams can make informed decisions that both give assurance about what is working well, and identifying priority areas for improvement.

How effective is my service or care, and how can I evidence this?

Once you know how things are working, you can start to identify key areas for improvement - This could mean refining a process, trying something new, or working differently as a team. Applying improvement methodologies (including research) and working in partnership with those that use services gives tools that enable planning of initiatives and measurement around how well these have worked.

Where are the areas in which we can improve?

Sharing what we’ve learned helps others make improvements, and drives out inequalities in provision of care. This includes lessons from our own work as well as knowledge from external sources, such as guidelines, formal and grey literature, reports, and events. It also enables us to start to contribute to the evidence base for community based services.

Shared learning and best evidence

Improvement happens when we test ideas in a structured way. By planning small, manageable changes and measuring their impact, teams can see what works before rolling it out more widely. This approach helps build confidence and ensures improvements are based on data – this then adds to the portfolio of evidence to demonstrate effectiveness.