Q Lab – an idea blossoms

This year we have launched the pilot Q Improvement Lab. The idea emerged from the Q Initiative – a community of people involved in improvement across the UK. We spoke to Tracy Webb, Head of Q Labs, about how the first Q Lab is developing.

What is the Q Improvement Lab (Q Lab) and how did it come about?

A year ago, the Lab was a seed of an idea that emerged through the co-design process used to develop Q. Q is an initiative connecting thousands of people who have improvement expertise across the UK. The Q community is a fantastic asset to the health and care system and when designing Q, it struck the founding members that both the community and health sector organisations are struggling with some of the same, complex issues. We thought there might be a way to provide a more intensive mechanism to support, accelerate and catalyse change. So we started developing ideas for the Q Lab.

Over the last 12 months, we have been undertaking research and talking to Q members and other labs from across the world to develop the ideas that we are now putting into practice. We are blending best practice from improvement research with methods for social change and innovation that have been developed as part of the global labs movement.

The Lab will focus on a complex issue facing multiple parts of the health and care sector. It will offer a space – a physical space, an online space and crucially head space – for people to work together at the forefront of exploring that issue. The Lab will provide design, analytical, research and communications support to make the most of the opportunities to reach hundreds of people.

There are synergies between the Q Lab and other labs. However, the Q Lab is unique because it is connected to the Q community and its diverse members who will work with us to contribute insights, develop ideas and test solutions.  

In November, we got the green light to proceed with setting up the pilot Lab. Since then we have been transforming the Lab from a concept to reality.

How will you decide on the first topic for the Q Lab to focus on?

We’re part way through the process of deciding the Lab’s first topic. We undertook research and identified a number of broad challenges and opportunities facing the health sector in the UK, before asking the Q members to vote on a shortlist. The most popular of these themes was ‘empowering people to manage their health and care needs’. We are now identifying areas of opportunity within that and we’re moving towards a topic.

Earlier this month, we held a workshop with 25 people who have experience and expertise around empowering people to manage their health and care needs, including a number of Q members. We explored empowering people to manage their health and care needs in some detail. We kick-started with some exercises to tease out what empowerment means to different people, absorbing lots of information that is already known about the area and exploring this from different perspectives. We were generating ideas and synthesising in real time, so the day was really action-packed and busy. We identified some key areas of opportunity and over the next few weeks, we’ll be working on the insights that came out of that workshop and mapping out next steps. We hope to finalise and announce the first topic in April, so watch this space! 

How can people get involved in the Q Lab?

There’s quite a bit of excitement and interest in the Lab among the Q members. People are keen to see what it will be like. It can sound a bit abstract and mysterious, but a key feature of the Lab is that it will be emergent, responsive and dynamic as we work with a diverse range of people and gather ideas. Part of our hypothesis is that quality improvement projects can often move very quickly to solutions and to implementation. This is understandable – the pressure in the health and care system is high and the answers can sometimes seem obvious. But we think it is really important to hold problems open for longer – to really analyse them from different angles and seek to deeply understand the key factors at play. The Lab is planning to look at a single complex issue, over a period of 9 to 12 months – drawing expertise from within and beyond the community.

We hope and expect a core group of people will be deeply interested in the topic the Lab is focusing on and will work with the Lab over many months to make progress, and generate and test new ideas. But we’re also hoping there will be a much wider group of people who will connect with the Lab in other ways, perhaps contributing particular expertise at certain points.

What do you hope the Q Lab will achieve?

This year is all about learning. The Lab is in pilot form and an evaluation team will work with us. The pilot is about finding out whether the Lab shows signs of being able to stimulate and support change.

We’re hoping for change in multiple ways, at multiple levels in the system. Ultimately, we hope the Lab will flourish, building skills and bringing people together in new ways to explore, develop, test and spread ideas that can significantly improve health and care for people in the UK.

Want to be involved? Email QLab@health.org.uk and we’ll be in touch. You can find out more on the Q website and follow the @theQCommunity on Twitter.