Around 260 people attended our first quality improvement (QI) conference.
It was held in Maidstone with those attending including colleagues from Kent Community Health NHS Trust (KCHFT) along with staff from other health trusts across Kent and Medway, colleagues from clinical commissioning groups, representatives from Kent County Council and patient representatives too.
There were presentations about QI projects which have taken place at KCHFT. These included one to prevent operations being cancelled on the day as a patient’s blood pressure is too high and another, which has reduced patient assessment time from 40 minutes to just two minutes.
Our conference was all about using the QI tried and tested tools and methodologies to make improvements in healthcare, with ideas coming from and led by those on the frontline.
The day included workshops and presentations and opened with a video welcome from Don Berwick, President of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement. Workshops were led by Sam Riley, Head of Improvement Analytics at NHS Improvement, whose talk was called Making Data Count and Trevor Dale, Managing Director of Atrainability, who spoke about safe and effective teams.
There were also workshops on a time saving concept called 15 seconds 30 minutes, one on working closely with patients to design healthcare services and another on using a national quality improvement portal, where good work is shared.
There was a handprint wall where delegates pledged their support for quality improvement and stands to let visitors know more about the services offered by KCHFT and partner organisations.
At KCHFT more than 70 quality improvement projects are under way.
Welcoming delegates to the event our Chief Executive Paul Bentley said: “Telling patients and our workforce what to do might have been the way 30 years ago, but that doesn’t work anymore. We need to engage with our patients and our workforce and quality improvement is part of that.
“Quality improvement works because it is about listening not telling. The world is changing and we are changing with it.”