Quality Improvement Resources
Medway KLS brings together knowledge mobilisation and quality improvement, embedding evidence-based practices and knowledge sharing into everyday activities.
We provide coaching, training and resources, including the best QI evidence available in books, journals and online, as well as the insight and experience of experts and organisations, to ensure everyone can make informed decisions and deliver sustainable change, taking the initiative to improve care. We support Improvers identify knowledge gaps and access the best evidence and expertise, so they can be confident they have the intelligence and knowledge for what works, what doesn’t, and why.
This page offers support and resources to help you make the best use of our guidance and quality standards.
QI Evidence Update
QI Evidence Resources
Evidence Based Resources
Training and development free online courses
The Learning Hub is HEE’s new digital platform that provides easy access to a wide range of resources that are pertinent to education and training in health and care.
The Learning Hub was released at the end of May 2020, with core functionality, to support the Coronavirus (COVID-19) response by enabling the health and care workforce to share and access resources during the pandemic. Many more features are planned as part of the product roadmap and new features will be released frequently in line with the original plan for the functionality of the Learning Hub in its Beta phase.
Since the Learning Hub’s launch over 550 quality resources have been contributed by many stakeholders from across the health and care workforce, including clinical commissioning groups, medical schools, training hubs, delivery operational networks, social care, professional bodies, charities and the simulation community. These resources include videos, webinars, slide presentations, Q&A packs, simulation scripts, lesson plans and web links.
You are invited to log on to the Learning Hub and form part of the evolving communities of learners by discovering, accessing, contributing and sharing resources. Sign in to the Learning Hub (https://learninghub.nhs.uk ) either using eligible e-Learning for Healthcare log in details or by creating a Learning Hub account.
Improvement Fundamentals: A radical programme of online courses for those involved in health and social care. The courses are free to take part in, and are delivered entirely online in the form of videos, articles, discussion and practical exercises that contribute to your own improvement project.
The programme is organised into four essential learning areas or suites.
- Quality improvement theory
- Quality improvement tools
- Measuring for quality improvement
- Spreading quality improvement
You can access these courses through creating free account on Quality Improvement (QI) Learning Platform. https://www.qilearning.england.nhs.uk/
Advanced HIKER status can be awarded as recognition for completing each of the four courses available in the Improvement Fundamentals programme. In addition to putting your new learning and skills into practice by completing a local improvement project and updating us with the results.
Explore new and better ways of organising health and social care services to improve quality with this free CPD-certified course. Why is quality improvement in health and social care systems so difficult? Why is it so challenging to bring in new and better ways of organising health and social care services?
Many reasons have been put forward: lack of money; lack of appropriate or complete knowledge; excessive and perhaps unnecessary regulations; and entrenched professional opinions and interests.
This course suggests that the main reason is complexity. Health and social care systems are inherently complex, with many interconnected activities and processes, and thus difficult to measure, analyse, change and improve.
Understand why change happens in healthcare environments and learn how to improve your response. In rapidly changing world, with new healthcare roles emerging and the complexity of care increasing, being able to respond to change is vital.
On this course for healthcare professionals, you will explore the issue of change in healthcare environments, and learn how to improve your response to change. In addition you will examine the reasons behind the demand for change and look at ways of empowering others to manage change positively. You should finish the course with a firm understanding of the importance of preserving and improving the quality of service provision, while adapting to change.
Start this free course now. Just create an account and sign in. Enrol and complete the course for a free statement of participation or digital badge if available.
This free course, Understanding service improvement in healthcare, will help you to understand what people mean by the terms ‘service’ and ‘improvement’ in relation to healthcare. The course will help you to think about how those involved in healthcare, whether as practitioners or service users, can monitor the progress of any initiative to improve care, and how they can make sure that any change is sustained.
Ensuring patient safety and healthcare quality is critical and should be a key focus of everyone in healthcare practice. This course provides healthcare practitioners and others with an introduction to the knowledge and skills needed to lead patient safety and quality improvement initiatives at the micro and macro levels. Participants will explore the foundations of health care quality and the science underlying patient safety and quality improvement, design and select effective health care measures, analyze patient safety problems and processes using tools such as human factors analysis, apply systematic approaches including the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) model to address quality improvement challenges, and learn strategies to lead a culture of change. The course takes a world view of patient safety and quality, linking participants to research and resources from the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Joint Commission and other international organizations. Course highlights include personal stories, lessons learned from other industries and interviews with the President of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and other leaders in quality movement.
Become a Leader in Patient Safety. Master the strategies and tools to implement effective patient safety and quality initiatives. Preventable patient harms, including medical errors and healthcare-associated complications, are a global public health threat. Moreover, patients frequently do not receive treatments and interventions known to improve their outcomes. These shortcomings typically result not from individual clinicians’ mistakes, but from systemic problems -- communication breakdowns, poor teamwork, and poorly designed care processes, to name a few.
The Patient Safety & Quality Leadership Specialization covers the concepts and methodologies used in process improvement within healthcare. Successful participants will develop a system’s view of safety and quality challenges and will learn strategies for improving culture, enhancing teamwork, managing change and measuring success. They will also lead all aspects of a patient safety and/or quality improvement project, applying the methods described over the seven courses in the specialization.
In this course, you will be able develop a systems view for patient safety and quality improvement in healthcare. By then end of this course, you will be able to: 1) Describe a minimum of four key events in the history of patient safety and quality improvement, 2) define the key characteristics of high reliability organizations, and 3) explain the benefits of having strategies for both proactive and reactive systems thinking.
Safety culture is a facet of organizational culture that captures attitudes, beliefs, perceptions, and values about safety. A culture of safety is essential in high reliability organizations and is a critical mechanism for the delivery of safe and high-quality care. It requires a strong commitment from leadership and staff. In this course, a safe culture is promoted through the use of identifying and reporting patient safety hazards, accountability and transparency, involvement with patients and families, and effective teamwork.
This course provides students with a set of tools and methodologies to plan and initiate a Problem Solving or Quality Improvement project. The first module presents methods for selecting, scoping and structuring a project before it is even initiated. It also introduces the project classifications of implementation and discovery. The second module describes the A3 problem solving methodology and the tool itself. Further in that same module, the student is shown tools to identify problems in flow, defects, and waste and to discover causes, brainstorm, and prioritize interventions. Module 3 shows a methodology within the implementation class. These methods are designed to overcome emotional and organizational barriers to translating evidence-based interventions into practice. The fourth and last module looks at one more way to approach improvement projects in the discovery class. These tools are specifically for new, out-of-the-box design thinking.
Keeping patient safety and quality improvement projects on track, on time, and on budget is critical to ensuring their success. In this course, students will be introduced and given the opportunity to apply a series of tools to guide and manage patient safety and quality initiatives. These include tools for defining what success looks like, developing a change management plan, and conducting a pre-mortem to identify risks for project failure. This course will also provide tools for engaging stakeholders to ensure key players are invested in your project’s success.
Now that you’ve carefully planned your patient safety and quality improvement project, the real work can begin. This course will introduce students to the unique challenges encountered when implementing, maintaining, and expanding a patient safety and quality initiative. Students will learn to apply lessons learned from the 4 E model and TRiP into developing specific aims for their QI project. Additionally, students will develop a plan to address the adaptive and technical challenges in their projects including whether their initiative needs to be submitted to an Institutional Review Board (IRB). Finally, students will develop plans to grow their local QI project into a system-wide project.
How will you know if your patient safety and quality project is meeting its objectives? Peter Drucker once said “What gets measured, gets managed.” In this course, students will learn why measurement is critical to quality improvement work. Equally important, they will learn which data sources provide the most meaningful information and tools for how and where to locate them. Finally, students will learn how to interpret data from their patient safety and quality projects to guide and modify them during implementation to maximize their chances of making a difference for patients.
In this culminating course in the Patient Safety and Quality Improvement Specialization, you will apply the skills you have acquired across the previous six courses to address a realistic patient safety issue confronting Mercy Grace, a 500-bed urban hospital that is part of a larger hospital system. Based on the scenario provided, you will assess the situation and work through the problem using a variety of tools and strategies. You will have the opportunity to identify defects, root causes, and potential mitigation strategies; you will create a project implementation plan for addressing the issue in the form of an A3; you will identify risks of project failure and design a change management plan; you will identify means of converting the project from local to system-wide; and you will identify quality and safety measurements that will be used in evaluating the success of the project’s implementation.
Have you ever though that healthcare quality could be improved - either where you get health care treatment or where you delivery health care? Have you ever thought that there should be a way for you to determine the relative quality of your choices? Have you found yourself thinking that there should be a way for you to provide your view and input on the quality of healthcare organization? Or do you work in a healthcare organization and find yourself thinking that there must be better ways to continuously and systematically improve the quality of your healthcare organization? If you have, this course is for you.
Course content includes an overview of quality and quality improvement programs, measures, and data in healthcare organizations. The course provides links to external sites to connect you to the larger "real world" of healthcare organization quality and quality improvement. The links also serve as resources you can take with you after you complete the course experience. And because everyone loves a road trip/field trip, there are also "virtual field trips" to the often hidden places of interest on the web.
Ensuring patient safety and healthcare quality is critical and should be a key focus of everyone in healthcare practice. This course provides healthcare practitioners and others with an introduction to the knowledge and skills needed to lead patient safety and quality improvement initiatives at the micro and macro levels. Participants will explore the foundations of health care quality and the science underlying patient safety and quality improvement, design and select effective health care measures, analyze patient safety problems and processes using tools such as human factors analysis, apply systematic approaches including the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) model to address quality improvement challenges, and learn strategies to lead a culture of change. The course takes a world view of patient safety and quality, linking participants to research and resources from the World Health Organization (WHO), the US Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), the Joint Commission and other international organizations. Course highlights include personal stories, lessons learned from other industries and interviews with the President of the National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA) and other leaders in quality movement.
In this course you will learn about the importance of quality in healthcare and how you can contribute by implementing a quality improvement (QI) project to improve processes of care and patient outcomes. You will learn about powerful tools to add to your QI ‘toolbox’ during short lectures and reflective exercises. You will apply these tools to the implementation of a QI project in your own practice setting or an area of personal improvement. At the completion of the course, you will have a storyboard that captures your QI project success to share with others.
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