Our Q Exchange Bids

The Initiative

The Q Exchange initiative transforms project ideas into reality with funding opportunities of up to £40,000.

We are excited to announce that two of our project ideas have won funding! Click the links below to learn more about them!

Project 1

Project 2

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Community peer improvement champions to shape health and social care

Training and supporting community leaders, third sector and public volunteers to become peer improvement champions creating lasting positive change across sector and system boundaries.

The project’s main goal is to establish a peer improvement champion programme, providing evidence-based training to enhance community members’ skills in quality improvement. Additional objectives include empowering and supporting community members to lead improvement initiatives, enhancing communication and coordination between stakeholders, developing community leadership, and ensuring inclusivity by reaching underserved communities through partnerships with organisations like HIVE Portsmouth and Bournemouth University Centre for Seldom Heard Voices.

The project addresses the challenge of improving collaboration between health and social care services and communities in the UK. It aims to overcome barriers that prevent effective cooperation by involving diverse community members and professionals. A pilot peer researcher collaboration with the Young Foundation highlighted the community’s desire to be actively involved in shaping positive changes. Building on the success of the pilot project, the initiative plans to scale up by developing community-based peer improvement champions. These champions will work across sectors to promote innovative solutions and improved practices, ensuring that community voices influence policies and decision-making processes. By fostering collaborative learning and sharing best practices nationally, the project aims to replicate its success across different systems.

A structured approach across 4 phases ensuring stakeholder engagement, efficiency, and quality throughout the peer improvement champion programme.

Phase 1: stakeholders (including peer researchers) will be engaged, and needs assessed to establish a steering committee. The framework for the peer improvement champion programme will be developed collaboratively.

Phase 2: will focus on the co-design of training materials, recruitment of diverse community members to participate in the programme, and partnership strengthening.

Phase 3: training sessions will commence, with an emphasis on accessibility and community engagement. Implementation of improvement initiatives, monitoring and evaluation will underpin this phase.

Phase 4: Looks at how to scale up the project, based on the evaluation findings and sustainability planning. Sharing learning through diverse channels, including publications, conference presentations, social media updates, toolkits, and a collaborative network. Providing ongoing support to peer improvement champions to lead and drive initiatives, sustaining the cross-system collaboration with key stakeholders and within communities.

We plan to share learning using a diverse range of strategies to ensure inclusivity:

Publication: write accessible articles and formal reports detailing project methodologies, findings and outcomes.
Presentation at conferences: for example, workshops or seminars to share insights and lessons learned.
Social media: ongoing throughout the project to share updates, success stories and key learnings.
Toolkits and resources: Develop toolkits, guides or online resources based on the project's methodologies and lessons learned. Make them freely available for download or distribution to support other communities or organisations interested in implementing similar projects.
Collaborative network: Develop new, and sustain existing partnerships and networks focussed on community-led improvement and health inequity. Sharing expertise, resources and learning to amplify collective impact and drive system change.

5 Aug 2024: Project initiation: stakeholder engagement, needs assessment and programme design.
4 Nov 2024: Initiate programme development: training material development, recruitment and partnership strengthening.
3 Feb 2025: Programme implementation: training delivery, implementation of community-led initiatives, monitoring and evaluation.
6 Aug 2025: Scaling and sustainability: sharing learning, exploring expansion opportunities, continuing support.

Making the Seemingly Impossible Possible: Demand & Capacity Changing Lives

This initiative will support services integrating as part of a merger to work with system partners to use a demand and capacity lens to facilitate whole pathway improvements in care.

Design and deliver a novel demand and capacity training programme with the aim of supporting services to make system pathway changes with the potential to optimise flow, manage demand, utilise capacity effectively, and consequently reduce waiting lists. Staff will gain skills and knowledge facilitating continuous proactive, data-driven, service demand and capacity planning and management.
Facilitate, through partnership working with the Integrated Care Board and other key system partners, joint learning and understanding of complex models of care will lead to improved relationships, communication and joint problem-solving.
Evaluate outcomes and impact of this training programme, collect lessons learned particularly around system-level change, and make recommendations for next steps and the way forward.
Publish programme content, case studies, learning and recommendations

The beneficiaries are service staff who will be empowered to use data to manage and improve services, patients and the broader healthcare system.

Integration of services across partner organisations and system boundaries is increasingly common. Successful outcomes require services to have a clear understanding of their pathways, flow, demand and capacity, and be able to apply key demand and capacity principles to make effective change that improves access, avoiding pitfalls which have the potential to increase waits and delays. Complex integration requires skills that often aren’t well-developed:

“People coming to operational roles are often clinicians by background. We (operational managers) don’t have the skills to tackle waiting lists or apply demand and capacity principles to fully understand a service”.

This project will work in partnership with the ICB, services across four merging Trusts and key stakeholders (Local Authorities and the Voluntary Sector). We will develop and evaluate a programme providing operationally driven and improvement-focused demand and capacity training and support for frontline teams, ensuring they have the skills to manage their service.

We will take a cohort approach supporting several teams to come together on four training days; augmented with ongoing project facilitation. We would expect services to put forward a multi-stakeholder team including operational and business support leads, team leaders, clinicians/ care professionals and a data analyst. We will strongly encourage representation from our ICB and input from service users.

We aim to support teams to take a whole service and system view; alongside key demand and capacity concepts, we will also explore concepts such as job planning, the psychology of queuing, helping patients to wait well, co-production and systems thinking. We will introduce a range of tools to support demand and capacity calculations and scenario planning.

We will provide the demand and capacity, improvement and co-production expertise and external expertise to provide training on systems thinking.

The impact will be measured via case studies and key service measures.

This project will include an evaluation for impact and shared learning – both in terms of process and outcomes. We will produce a guide to programme content, hints and tips for other organisations wanting to provide a similar programme, and we will share critical factors that support spread and sustainability. We will produce stories and case studies from participating teams. The evaluation and any resources will be available to any Q members, and we would like to share blogs and workshop content as the programme progresses.

4 Jul 2024: Programme design and scoping
2 Sep 2024: Start team recruitment process
6 Oct 2024: Finalise teams and start preparations with teams
4 Nov 2024: Training programme day 1
16 Dec 2024: Training programme day 2
3 Feb 2025: Training programme day 3
11 Mar 2025: Training programme day 4
12 Mar 2025: Post-programme evaluation commences
1 Apr 2025: Co-design of resources and case studies for sharing
2 Jun 2025: Publication of evaluation and resources

Listen to Helen Wharam who discusses her work on improvement projects for Demand and Capacity within Health and Care services in the NHS.

Hosted by Joe Blunden, Managing Director, NHS Elect.

Research training

Improvement training

Workshops

Events and campaigns

Our Q Exchange Bids

The Initiative

Community peer improvement champions to shape health and social care

Making the Seemingly Impossible Possible: Demand & Capacity Changing Lives