The Health Foundation focuses on five strategic aims to improve the quality of healthcare.
1. Improving the quality of care by transforming the dynamic between people who use services and those who provide them
We believe that to achieve the best outcomes and experience, people need to be able to play an active role in their care and their care needs to be personalised. This is not solely the remit of the clinicians and managers who provide, plan and organise services. Nor can we simply support patients to be more active in their own healthcare. We need to transform the dynamic created by the way care systems work and organise services around the needs of the people using them.
The objectives for this aim are to:
- Support healthcare systems to test and refine interventions that support patients to play an active role in managing their health and healthcare
- Promote the development of skills in partnership working with patients as a core element of the education and training of healthcare professionals
- Convince healthcare policy makers and practitioners to adopt proven strategies and interventions for supporting patients to make an active contribution to improve health and healthcare
- Explore and evaluate approaches to involving patients in quality improvement activities and their relationship to improved health and healthcare outcomes.
Ongoing programmes under this strategic aim
- Co-creating Health – This programme is testing a new way of supporting people with long-term conditions to self-manage. It combines a self-management programme for patients, a clinician development programme and service improvement.
- MaiKhanda – A six-year, large-scale programme that aims to save the lives of women and newborn babies in Malawi and provide real and sustainable changes to maternity and newborn care.
2 Engaging with clinical communities to improve healthcare quality and value
We recognise that improving the quality and value of health services relies on the participation of people working at every level of healthcare. Through our work in this area we are supporting clinicians to take an active role in quality improvement.
The objectives for this aim are to:
- Work with clinical communities across services to demonstrate measureable improvements in healthcare quality and value
- Convince decision-makers and clinical teams to create sustainable systems which measure and use clinical quality and patients outcomes to improve care
- Work with national professional communities to promote activities which will accelerate measurable improvements in healthcare quality and value
- Promote quality and safety improvement, including working with patients, as a significant part of professional education and development.
Programmes under this strategic aim:
Current:
- Closing the Gap through Clinical Communities aims to improve the quality of care delivered to patients by bridging the gap between known best practice and the routine delivery of care.
Ongoing:
- Engaging with Quality in Primary Care - This initiative involves nine projects engaging primary care clinicians in the quality improvement process.
Past:
- Engaging with Quality Initiative - This scheme aimed to improve the quality of clinical care by engaging clinicians in quality improvement.
3 Transforming organisational approaches to deliver safer patient care
We are working to help healthcare organisations throughout the UK improve the quality of services they offer to patients. As a priority we are focusing on helping organisations to provide the safest possible care for their patients.
The objectives for this aim are to:
- Transform organisational approaches to achieve measurable and sustained improvements in the safety of care for patients
- Support the development of skills to spread effective methods for patient safety improvement within and beyond organisational boundaries
- Support system-wide strategies to adopt and spread effective patient safety practices
- Test and develop new methods for improving patient safety and improved reliability
- Convince policy-makers to embed safety as a critical system performance issue.
Programmes under this strategic aim:
Current:
- Safer Patients Network - Launched in June 2009, this will test, develop and export ways to make healthcare safer for patients and build improvement skills in their systems of care.
- Safer Clinical Systems - Launched in October 2008 the programme will test and demonstrate ways to improve healthcare systems or processes to systematically improve patient safety.
- Improving patient safety in mental health – This programme is to support four organisations across the UK to improve the reliability of care in order to reduce harm and raise safety awareness throughout their organisations.
- Improving the safety of maternity services – The aim of this programme of work is to improve the safety and reliability of obstetrics and midwifery through a teamwork solution, by developing exceptional clinical leadership skills, team practices and unit-level improvement capability in four UK hospitals
- Safer Patients Initiative 2 – We launched a second phase of this scheme, which aimed to make hospitals safer for patients.
- Safer Patients Initiative 1 – This scheme was launched to ensure that patient safety was tackled in order to improve the quality and performance of healthcare.
4. Developing leaders to improve health and healthcare
Effective, skilled leaders lie at the heart of lasting improvements to healthcare. We help health professionals develop their leadership potential so they can change healthcare for the better and inspire others to do the same. We offer high-quality leadership development opportunities – free of charge – to healthcare professionals from a wide range of organisational and professional backgrounds who aspire to be the best. We also work to influence providers of leadership development in healthcare to put quality improvement at the heart of their solutions.
The objectives for this aim are to:
- Build will and focus attention on the role of leaders and leadership in improving the quality of healthcare
- Seek out and develop people with potential to lead quality improvement
- Convince healthcare organisations to invest in the development of leadership explicitly linked to quality improvement
- Explore and develop robust methods for measuring impact.
Programmes under this strategic aim:
Current:
- GenerationQ – This leadership programme aims to create skilled and effective leaders for quality improvement by providing interventions which are effective and grounded leadership development and improvement science best practice.
- Quality Improvement Fellowships – This scheme offers participants a unique opportunity to spend a year at the Institute of Healthcare Improvement in the US, building their knowledge of quality improvement.
Ongoing:
- Health Foundation Leadership Fellows – This scheme offers personalised leadership development to individuals who have the potential to make an outstanding contribution to improving the quality of healthcare in the UK.
- Leaders for Change – This scheme offers an opportunity for health professionals to acquire the skills and knowledge to lead change and achieve lasting improvements in patient care.
- Clinician Scientist Fellowship Scheme – This scheme enables participants to pursue academic research alongside clinical practice.
Past:·
- Shared Leadership for Change – This scheme funds leadership development for teams working across organisational boundaries to provide high quality care for people with diabetes.
- Harkness/Health Foundation Fellowships – These fellowships offer an opportunity for the rising stars of healthcare in the UK to spend a year in the US, examining its health system and learning more about healthcare policy.
- Shared leadership (BME) – Aimed at improving the quality of healthcare for people from black and minority ethnic (BME) groups. This scheme supported teams working on projects aiming to improve health for people from BME populations in their local communities.
5. Building and promoting knowledge on how to improve care
We strive to make a significant improvement to the international knowledge base on the quality and performance of healthcare. We do this by commissioning independent reports in the UK, and evaluations of our own programmes, which help us to identify the interventions that really work to improve the quality of healthcare. The objectives for this strategic aim are to:
- Seek intelligence about leading edge practice and policy to identify new areas for development
- Produce coherent and accessible performance information
- Generate convincing evidence about improvements in care
- Stimulate debate about methods and work collaboratively both nationally and internationall
- Frame a positive agenda for quality improvement.
Ongoing programmes under this strategic aim:
- Quest for Quality and Improved Performance (QQUIP). This initiative will provide independent reports on a wide range of data about the quality and performance of healthcare provided in the UK.
For more information, see Our approach to research and development
Central to our strategy for improving the quality of healthcare is a rigorous programme of evaluation. This enables us to assess the impact of our work objectively and to evaluate the effectiveness of our ideas for improving healthcare quality. We also communicate these results to healthcare decision-makers.
For more information, see Our evaluation approach