Abstract

We know that the quality of healthcare varies throughout the UK. It is not always safe, and the variation can lead to poor patient experiences and outcomes. There is also an economic climate in which healthcare funding may not increase for some time. Healthcare services are being challenged to respond to this, not through indiscriminate cuts, but by improving efficiency, driving up quality and reducing levels of harm.

Although the NHS is no stranger to change, most efforts at improvement have limited success. In order to improve the efficacy of our improvement projects, there is a growing understanding that clinicians should be leading improvement and doing this using proven quality improvement and implementation science methodologies.

We know learning is most successful if rooted in a familiar context, and theoretical concepts are best understood if reinforced by practical experience, so we focused on creating an improvement science teaching website for the perioperative clinician, grounded in real life examples and providing useful tools for those engaged in quality improvement. Further information available at the website: www.prism-ed.com.

Additional Information

This presentation was given at the Fifth Annual Homerton Simulation Conference: Innovations in Healthcare, Patient Safety and Simulation, Homerton University Hospital, London, UK, on 10 December 2015.

Conflicts of interest: none declared.