Growing continuous and sustainable improvement in health and care – new Q members

On 4 July, we held the welcome event for new Q members from the UCLPartners region. Q is an initiative connecting people across the UK who have health and care improvement expertise.

The aim of the event was to bring the members together for the first time, helping them to connect and to start building their networks across both their organisations and the wider partnership. It also provided information about Q, the opportunities on offer by being part of the community and why being part of Q is important.

Growing the community

In June 2017, UCLPartners selected 88 people from our partner organisations to join Q. Together with the 20 members recruited from earlier rounds, they will join over 1300 other members of this innovative UK-wide improvement community.

Sharing expertise

Speakers included Charlie Davie, Managing Director and Kate Hall, Director of Capability Development from UCLPartners who gave members an overview of who UCLPartners are, what we do and how we can support the new Q members in our region.

Penny Pereira, the Q Programme Director at the Health Foundation gave a great introduction to the overall Q community and some examples of what members have achieved already before handing over to Sibylle Erdman, one of our founding Q members, presented from the perspective of a patient/carer representative on the importance of considering co-production in improvement work. She also helped to spark what Q is all about by inviting new members to speak to other people they didn’t know and discover mutual work interests; there was so much enthusiasm, it took a while for the conversation to subside before lunch!

Sibylle also joined two other founding Q members, Stephen O’Connor and Victoria Jones in a panel Q&A session to help new members think about how they can get the best from being part of Q and what they will pledge to bring to the community. We’d heard early on in the session how new members wanted an opportunity to ‘get off work the treadmill’, share ideas and unlock opportunities and the pledges gave members a chance to start sharing and tackling these issues – we handed out some exciting art materials to spark their creativity!

Find out more

Some photos from the day are included below and you can see more, as well as other pictures and tweets about the day, on Storify

For more information about the aims of the Q initiative, what it offers and a directory of all its members please visit the Q website or contact Sophie Bulmer.