Strategy to be published shortly.

Before starting a piece of quality improvement work, please check out our simple rules document to see whether what you are planning is a quality improvement project, a clinical audit, a piece of service evaluation or research.

If, following your review of the simple rules, you decide that what you are planning to do is a quality improvement project, then fill in our Quality Improvement Project Proposal Form and send to qualityimprovement@merseycare.nhs.uk for one of the team to review and provide feedback.

You can use this summary poster template to provide a summary of the quality improvement work completed, results to date, any lessons learned and recommendations for next steps.

Our Quality Improvement Toolkit provides information and guidance to support you in completing a quality improvement project and includes tools and techniques that you can use along the way.

It is accompanied by:

AQuA is an NHS health and care quality improvement organisation working across the NHS, care providers and local authorities to identify, refine and embed sustainable strategies for high quality care and regulatory excellence.

Established in 2010, they operate as a membership organisation within the NHS, providing quality improvement expertise, specialist learning and development, and consultancy.

For more information about the learning and development offer please visit their Courses and Events page. Mersey Care staff are able to access the programmes and courses available free of charge as part of our membership.

If you would like further information about their consultancy offer, please contact qualityimprovement@merseycare.nhs.uk in the first instance.

  • NHS IMPACT (Improving Patient Care Together) is the new, single, shared NHS improvement approach. By creating the right conditions for continuous improvement and high performance, systems and organisations can respond to today’s challenges, deliver better care for patients and give better outcomes for communities.
  • A critical part of any improvement work is being able to demonstrate that changes are really an improvement and having a good measurement plan is key to this.  NHS England’s “How-to guide for measurement for improvement” gives helpful guidance on how to effectively measure for improvement and includes a useful template for defining measures.
  • Since 1991, the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has used improvement science to advance and sustain better outcomes in health and health care across the word. They have taken improvement methods originally used in the manufacturing industry and applied them to improving all aspects of health and health care. They build improvement capability by providing people with methods, resources, and tools to make care better.
  • The Health Foundation is an independent charity committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK. In 2021, they published Quality improvement made simple, a guide focusing on quality improvement in the context of health care.
  • Health Innovation North West Coast supports the discovery, development and deployment of innovations and improvements in health and social care across Cheshire, Merseyside, Lancashire and South Cumbria.  The innovations supported are ideas, services, products and processes that improve health and the quality of care and drive costs down.  They are one of 15 Health Innovation Networks across England and work with healthcare organisations and businesses to support the spread of all types of innovation within the NHS.
  • Statistical process control (SPC) is an analytical technique that plots data over time. It helps us understand variation and, in so doing, guides us to take the most appropriate action. SPC is a good technique to use when implementing change as it enables you to understand whether changes you are making are resulting in improvement — a key component of the Model for Improvement widely used within the NHS. NHS England provide a freely available excel based Statistical Process Control tool on their website. 

Life QI is a web platform that supports the delivery of improvement projects and programmes and helps build improvement skills. It brings together the tools and information teams need to design, test and measure improvements. If you would like to find out more, please contact qualityimprovement@merseycare.nhs.uk