Introducing Collaborative Quality Improvement

Trainees have a unique ability to identify opportunities for improvement within hospital systems, but we often feel unable to highlight problems and implement change.

If this sentiment resonates with you, get involved with Collaborative Quality Improvement, a new QI initiative launched by a group of fellows from the National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellow Scheme 2015/16.

At the start of our fellowship, we all discussed what it was that had motivated us to apply to the scheme. A recurring theme was the frustration at being unable to influence local systems to create change and improve patient care. The multiple barriers to innovation – poor local leadership, deficient consultant engagement, disconnect between clinicians and managers, entrenched archaic processes and structures – can make it very difficult for a single junior doctor to devise and complete quality improvement (QI) projects. Motivated, smart junior doctors unable to implement their brilliant ideas are a waste. Couldn’t this talent be supported to produce an end product and deliver improved patient care?

Trainee-led, collaborative surgical audit and research has really taken off in the past few years, producing randomised control trials and cohort studies with publications in high impact journals. The power of collaborative research lies in multiple centres (hundreds!) all performing the same project locally and submitting their results to a coordinating team. The sample size is therefore bigger and the results are more generalisable. The coordinating team does most of the boring grunt work – preparing protocols, methods, data collection tools, and writing up the project – leaving local collaborators to simply collect the data. Instead of hundreds of separate people doing their registrar’s ‘great idea’ for an audit which goes in the bin, large scale collaboration on the same project produces meaningful results.

Are you thinking what I’m thinking…?

Why not collaborate on large scale QI projects?! Through the first trainee-led, national collaborative QI initiative in the UK, we aim to deliver national QI projects. The concept of Collaborative QI has the potential to make a significant impact on the quality and safety of care we provide to patients in the NHS. British Olympic cycling guru Dave Brailsford famously used the aggregation of marginal gains to deliver huge success for his team – we want to do the same in the NHS. By collaborating on our first QI project in summer 2016, you could be part of something amazing.

Find out how to get involved and follow us on Twitter @cQI_2016.