Our completed programmes

Our 'Improving patient safety in mental health' programme supported four organisations to improve mental health services and reduce harm for service users.

Our Engaging with Quality in Primary Care programme has helped several clinical teams to understand and apply quality improvement techniques and measure the results. This is turn will add to the evidence base on quality improvement so that others can benefit.

The Engaging with Quality Initiative funded royal colleges and other professional organisations to carry out clinical quality improvement projects, all of which had identified gaps between current and best practice in areas of acute care.

The Health Foundation Leadership Fellows scheme aimed to develop individuals with the potential to become the future leaders of high quality healthcare.

In 2009 the Health Foundation commissioned the Institute for Health Improvement (IHI), based in the US, to design and test a simple method to identify waste that front-line staff encounter on a day-to-day basis, and report this waste to senior hospital leaders in a way that is useful to them in waste reduction efforts.

This programme aims to reduce the variability in, and improve the flow of patients through, the neonatal and paediatric emergency and planned general surgery pathways, by applying innovative solutions.

The aim of 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.

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.

We are funding a programme to investigate how clinics can be better matched to demand, how waste can be reduced, efficiencies achieved and patient safety improved.

Leaders for Change aimed to equip health professionals working in service improvement with the skills and knowledge to lead change and achieve lasting improvements in patient care.

In October 2009, the Care Home use of Medicines Study (CHUMS), funded by the Department of Health, found unacceptable levels of error in the medications received by care home residents. In response to the report, the Royal College of Physicians, the Royal College of General Practitioners, the Royal College of Psychiatrists, the Health Foundation and Age UK partnered to capture stories from a carer perspective and start work to support the care home sector.

This research programme investigated the effectiveness of web-based feedback to drive quality improvement in the health service.

Our Safer Patients Initiative (SPI) ran from 2004–2008. It was set up to find practical ways of improving hospital safety and to demonstrate what can be achieved through an organisation-wide approach to patient safety.

Our Safer Patients Network is a vibrant, self-sustaining, innovative group of organisations. They test, develop and explore ways of building improvement skills and making healthcare safer for patients.

We supported six outstanding multi-organisational or multi-disciplinary teams (including social services and voluntary sector organisations) to adopt a shared leadership approach designed to develop the project teams’ effectiveness.

Shared Leadership for Change (diabetes) offers leadership development for multidisciplinary teams working across organisational boundaries to provide high-quality care for diabetes patients.

Stroke 90:10 aims to set the pace for the rest of the NHS working in parallel with the government which published its own National Stroke Strategy in December 2007.