Q: momentum is growing Get involved

With the 70-year anniversary of the NHS, July has been a month for combining celebration for what the NHS continues to achieve with calls for further debate and action to ensure health and care services in the UK will meet the needs of generations to come. 

There is a clear call for the NHS to provide more integrated, holistic services, and to ensure that social care and prevention are properly supported. Now more than ever people need to be collaborating across professional and sector boundaries, and thinking about the whole of people’s lives when planning care. The change this requires will call on all the improvement expertise we have across the system.  

We need to get smarter at sharing ideas and spreading good practice. This means focusing not just on coming up with innovative new ways of delivering care, but on developing more sophisticated strategies for scaling those ideas so our investment of time and resource reaches all those people and places that can benefit. Evidence suggests that peer networks can play a critical role in that process. 

The opportunity to celebrate the contribution of the staff who work in health and care is a good reminder of the many talented and committed people it takes to both deliver and improve care. Behind the aspiration to reduce unwarranted variation is a reality of many thousands of interlocking processes and teams that need to understand, shape and support change.

The growing momentum behind Q

This month’s newsletter focuses on Q, an initiative that seeks to help us make the best use of the ideas and improvement expertise that exist in the UK health and care sector. There’s a lot of momentum behind Q and we want to celebrate that. Take this newsletter as your invitation to get involved.  

More than 2,400 people have now joined Q. Their work as a community is helping to:

• Increase the visibility of people leading improvement efforts and the work they are doing.
• Equip members with skills and support to better lead improvement work and more effectively develop the improvement capability of those around them.
• Create space for collaboration and conduits for spread, so we can get the most from the ideas and improvement capacity available in the UK.  

Here some of the members share stories about how Q is benefitting them and their organisations. If you’re inspired to join or encourage others to do so, applications are now open on a rolling basis throughout 2018. 

How Q works

Q is delivered in partnership with NHS Improvement and organisations from all the countries of the UK. The initiative has several connected elements, co-designed to respond to what people involved in leading improvement said would be most helpful to accelerate their work:

• Q’s membership offer gives people with improvement expertise flexible development and networking opportunities and ways to learn together and collaborate more easily.  
• The Q Improvement Lab (Q Lab) brings together individuals and organisations from Q and beyond to make progress on specific shared health and care challenges. You can read here highlights from the first lab project which looked at scaling patient peer support, and we are excited to announce we’ll be collaborating with Mind on the second Q Lab project. Tracy tells us more in her blog. 
• Q Exchange – a new funding programme open to Q members – seeks to use the collective intelligence of the community to identify and enhance ideas for change, channelling funding to projects with the greatest potential to benefit service users and the system. We’ve just announced the 25 projects that have been shortlisted through this innovative programme. Find out more.

How you can get involved

We’ll soon be publishing a report sharing learning from the independent evaluation of Q and the Q Lab, which shows promising examples of benefits for members and highlights the significant future potential of Q. 

If you’re already a member of Q, we hope you feel proud of the community of which you are part and promote the opportunity to apply to others. The evaluation found that many members want to engage more in Q than they currently find they have the time to do – Q is developing fast, so check out the website to find out whether there are new virtual or face to face events or special interest groups you might want to get involved in.    

If you’re involved in working to making health and care better – from whatever background – and are keen to take a more collaborative approach to your work, why not take a look at how to apply to join Q. 
If you’re responsible for encouraging change within your team, organisation or area, use the publicly searchable Q member directory to check out who is in Q who might be interested in your work or have skills to bring.   

The high degree of interest in Q suggests it’s tapped into a collaborative ethos people feel is much needed in our often fragmented health and care sector. Going with the grain of the collective commitment on which the NHS is founded, Q exists to support a more joined up approach to improvement in the UK. Now is the perfect time to get involved.

Penny Pereira (@PennyPereira1) is Assistant Director at the Health Foundation