Improvement Fellows

The challenge

Improvement has never been more important for health and social care.

The 2013 Berwick review into patient safety, A promise to learn: a commitment to act, stated that “the most important single change in the NHS… would be for it to become, more than ever before, a system devoted to continual learning and improvement of patient care, top to bottom and end to end.”

What is the partnership doing?

We established our Improvement Fellows programme in 2016 to connect people, provide opportunity for open dialogue in a safe environment away from the usual workplace, offer time and space to reflect and plan, as well as creating the opportunity for more tangible learning to bring the benefits back to participants’ local organisations.

Our Improvement Fellows come from a range of backgrounds; from primary and acute care, to mental health and social services, junior doctors and GPs to allied health professionals and general management.

Through the Improvement Fellows Programme, they support each other, their own organisations and others in delivering better results for patients and populations.

Importantly, they also better equip themselves and their organisations to progressively improve over time.

Over the twelve-month programme, the Improvement Fellows:

• Take part in workshops, including masterclasses on improvement from experts, and have the opportunity to reflect and explore their ideas, challenges and priorities with faculty and colleagues
• Develop as a network of like-minded people to build a community to turn to for inspiration, support and expertise that go beyond their current local and professional networks and endure over time
• Access wider communities of improvers, such as the Q Initiative participants from our partnership
• Utilise learning resources including a free subscription to IHI’s Open School. Organisations benefit not only from the development of participants, but also from better access to great ideas, opportunities and talent from across the system, which can then be harnessed and deployed for wider benefit.

The fellows

Our current cohort of Improvement Fellows will complete the programme on 12 December 2019.

Recruitment to future cohorts of our Improvement Fellows Programme is on hold while we review our strategy. For information about the other quality improvement opportunities we offer please email QI@uclpartners.com