Briefing: Improvement as mainstream business

The strategic case

The NHS is now 75 years old. Together with other care sectors it faces an almost unprecedented array of challenges, but extra capital investment and the promised extra staff in key professions alone will not be enough to deliver the breadth and depth of change needed. Alongside the management and operational infrastructure and culture of health care, improvement approaches and methods can help to address the many delivery and transformation challenges health care faces.

Improvement is about giving the people closest to issues affecting care quality the time, permission, skills and resources they need to solve them. Yet improvement has remained at the fringes of the policy debate about the future of the NHS and other care services in recent years. And while improvement approaches have been in common use in some health care settings for more than 20 years, often generating impressive results, they are far from being embedded into the core strategy and operations of every organisation or system-wide partnership of organisations.

This briefing provides an overview of the improvement landscape in the NHS today and the benefits of improvement, and considers what's needed to overcome the barriers to embedding improvement approaches in all health care settings. More detailed examples of specific improvement interventions and the benefits they can deliver are available in our companion guide, 'A guide to making the case for improvement'.