Capturing QI in action | News

Quality Improvement (QI) is a buzzword in healthcare. Many recent Trust projects aimed at improving the quality and safety of our services have cited it as being at the root of their success. But what is QI all about and why is it so important?

A quick definition is that QI is a systematic approach to problem-solving that is guided by data to improve the quality and safety of a service. Seeing QI in action is the best way to understand how it works, however. To illustrate this, Sarah Scales, Associate Director of Transformation and Video Producer Michael Wadley have created a short video showing an outstanding example of QI in action. 

The project in question is the relocation of our Covid Vaccination Hub from the staff restaurant to the physiotherapy gym. 

Sarah said:  “ Our team was tasked with relocating a fully-functioning vaccination centre into a new venue a third of the size of the original one. And we were given less than a week to plan, set up and go live.” 

A multi-disciplinary team consisting of nurses, doctors, pharmacists, infection control, estates and admin staff worked together using QI processes to map out the challenge, gather data, organise, test and re-test the workflow.

Sarah said: “The results of the project exceeded all expectations as the team not only moved the Hub in an impressive two days to the smaller space, but also managed to reduce the time taken to vaccinate a patient by 14 minutes.

“We tackled what looked like an impossible challenge and, ultimately, achieved a faster, more efficient vaccination process, which we’re very proud of.

“This is a fantastic example of agile QI in action and we hope that other teams at the Trust will watch our video and be inspired to put QI into practice themselves.”