As part of our series of blogs looking back at ten years of East Midlands Academic Health Science Network, Kay Khan, Head of Improvement Programme Delivery, reflects on how the AHSN’s ability to bring people together has helped shift the dial for patient safety in the East Midlands. 

People often ask me what patient safety means. Put simply, we want to improve outcomes in health and social care, by avoiding unintended harm and reducing unnecessary variation. To do this, we work with professionals, people with lived experience, commissioners and managers to help them run quality improvement projects. 

Quality improvement (QI) is another piece of jargon, but it basically means making changes that can help a process or service work better. It is a methodology captured in the Institute of Healthcare’s Model for Improvement, which Patient Safety Collaboratives use to deliver the National Patient Safety Improvement Programmes. 

Each Academic Health Science Network hosts a Patient Safety Collaborative (PSC), and there are 15 in total, covering England. We’re experts in quality improvement and spend most of our time supporting teams in health and care to help them really understand their challenges, and to benchmark and track the results through rapid cycles of testing and learning. 

We have a lot of tools at our disposal, from measurement tools like the simple safety cross to detailed and insightful run charts, and driver diagrams to capture ideas. 

However, perhaps the most powerful tool at our disposal is our ability to bring people together to work on a common problem. From simple webinars to detailed appreciative inquiry sessions, or communities of practice to more structured collaboratives, we create effective partnerships between those who are best placed to guide and bring about change. 

I’m proud of our record: since PSCs were established in 2014, we’ve engaged with thousands of people and helped them make a real difference across the region. Here are five tips that I have found work particularly well to get the best engagement. 

1. Always include people with lived experience 

We make sure that all of our programmes include representation from people who have first-hand experience of the issues we’re trying to improve. They help ground conversations in reality and often come up with simple ideas that can have a big impact. 

We’ve been working with Joined Up Care Derbyshire on a national priority to improve chronic pain management by reducing harm from opioid prescribing. Through a series of events, we have helped create a whole-system approach, which was informed by those who live with chronic pain, including this powerful video from Paul Hemsil. 

Another example is where We recently collaborated with the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network, and the East and West Midlands Associations of Adult Social Care (ADASS), on a pilot programme commissioned by NHS England in response to the LeDeR (Learning Disability Mortality Review) report. 

Through the pilot, we involved 91 people with learning disabilities and 100 support workers across 13 supported living providers to understand the challenges they and their families have in identifying and preventing health problems. They tested and trialled new tools, tech and processes and their feedback was invaluable in recommending next steps. 

2. Give people the space to be creative 

When we hold webinars and events, we take care not to simply download information or ‘death by PowerPoint’. Instead, we take more of a facilitator role and let the participants share their experiences and learning. This allows room for people to be more creative and leads to fresh thinking. 

We’ve been working with mental health providers across the region for two years now to reduce restrictive practices at in-patient services. In that time, we’ve engaged with 29 wards, 13 specialities and across 7 providers and along with regular network meetings, have organised two in-person events where they’ve had an opportunity to share their different approaches using posters. You can view some of them here. This has become a really well-connected group which continues to learn and develop from each other. 

3. Share the learning

There’s a quote often shared in quality improvement circles, attributed to the artist Picasso via Apple’s Steve Jobs, about ‘shamelessly stealing’ ideas. If it’s a good idea, there’s no point in keeping it to yourself.

Our popular, quarterly ‘Connecting Together’ webinars for care homes have been a brilliant forum for care professionals to come together and discuss ways of spotting and managing residents whose health suddenly deteriorates. Collectively we have worked with over 630 care homes and also delivered training to 437 staff in 130  care homes.

In 2022, we offered 15 fully-funded places to join a ‘Developing Improvement Leaders’ programme, for people working in management or leadership roles in 12 health and care organisations. The programme provided a forum for sharing experiences, learning and ideas, and the feedback from participants was positive.

4. Celebrate success

At a time when pressure on care homes has rarely been so great, at many of our events we’ve taken the time to stop and celebrate their achievements through our popular Care Home Awards. We recently held our first in-person event for care home staff in two years, and awarded six outstanding winners awards for their work. You can watch their inspiring stories here.

5. Keep it going

Improvement is a journey – there’s always more to do. It’s important to keep people engaged and try out new approaches.

Our maternity and neonatal support has been focusing on the optimisation and stabilisation of pre-term babies. We brought over 100 people together through action learning groups to work in partnership and grow joint networks with our colleagues in West Midlands PSC. To support staff resilience and health and wellbeing, we compiled a pack of useful resources and held an ‘Art of Being Brilliant’ workshop.

Find out more

With funding through the Q community by the Health Foundation and NHS England, we worked with a small group of care homes from across the region to develop ‘React to Quality Improvement’. This is a video-based training resource anyone can use to help start their QI journey.

You can find out more about our current patient safety programmes on the website.