Well, what can we say about our first regional QI Week? It was a great success and a brilliant opportunity to network with like minded colleagues. Let me tell you a little more about it...
The "what" and the "who"
There’s a week or a day dedicated to pretty much everything – but until recently, nothing for Quality Improvement. Being huge fans, we decided to change this, and work with our colleagues from across the South to launch Quality Improvement Week, 2023.
It didn’t take much persuading, and quickly we were a working group of seven NHS Trusts plus an Integrated Care Board (ICB) located across Hampshire, the Isle of Wight and Dorset.
We chose ‘Celebrating and Demystifying QI’ as the theme for the week because not only did we want to help bust some of the myths surrounding QI, but also show how impactful and beneficial it can be.
How?
As a region we met regularly to look at what activities we could host throughout the week and how we were going to promote this with a robust communication plan. We put together a webpage which hosted all of the content from across the region, making it a"one stop shop" for all things #QIWeek2023.
What?
We had a range of activities taking place within each organisation as well as some joined up online events. At Solent, for instance, we asked staff to complete pledges for QI, had drop-in stands around our sites, and held online QI lunchtime café’s and learning events. The week ended with a keynote speaker, Jane Murkin, Deputy Director for Nursing Safety and Improvement, NHS England. If you're interested, you can find a full schedule of the events we held here and across the region on the QI webpage.
We did this together with our patient and public partners (Side-by-Side), who were phenomenal throughout the week. A social media campaign across several platforms also kept people engaged and informed.
How we measured success…
Relationships and partnership working
By far the biggest success of the week was the creation of relationships and joined up working across the Trusts in our region. All the NHS Trusts were involved, and the result has been a strong network of improvement leads who are keen to work together going forward. QI week was the event that has bought us together, doing something positive and fun.
It also gained loads of attention from across the UK, with people joining the online events from all over the country – even someone from the British Virgin Islands! We have many more Trusts keen to get involved next year.
Metrics
As this is our first improvement week, we didn’t really have any baseline data that we could use to measure the success of the week. However, we did look at the analytics from our website and social media platforms, and we know that visits to the website doubled.
We also had a reach far and wide, although most of our hits were from the UK, we captured the attention of people from around the world as shown in the below picture. This was more then we could have imagined.
Here at the Academy, we'd like to say a big thank you to everyone who was involved QI Week 2023, especially our Side-by-Side members and our guest speakers, and we look forward to celebrating QI with you all again next year!