Five senior healthcare leaders from across the UK have been offered a prestigious Quality Improvement Fellowship by the Health Foundation.
The Quality Improvement Fellowships develop and equip clinically qualified senior NHS leaders with the tools and techniques of quality improvement, with the aim of integrating their learning into their organisations and becoming quality improvement champions within the UK. The five fellows will spend a year in the US at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where they will combine academic learning with the development of leadership skills and healthcare quality improvement techniques. One of the fellows, Dr Hans Hartung, a consultant respiratory physician at NHS Ayrshire and Arran, will be focusing on ways to improve person-centred care. He wants to understand how, in practice, person-centred care can be systematically embedded in a healthcare system, starting small then moving onto a much larger, national scale. Another fellow, Erica Reid, national programme lead, emergency care pathways at Scottish Government Health Directorates, will focus on management of inpatient capacity and flow, and improvement methodology at organisation/systems boundaries. Lynda Brooks, assistant director of improvement programmes at the Health Foundation, said: “Our previous Quality Improvement Fellows are beginning to make real changes to the quality of care in the UK. We are confident that this year’s fellows will go on to make a significant contribution to improving the care of patients across the UK.” On their return to the UK, fellows will integrate their learning into processes and procedures at their employing organisation in order to impact on service improvement.
