ELFT supporting ‘Fast Track Cities’ HIV prevention improvement collaborative

by Marco Aurelio (Improvement Advisor) and Katherine Brittin (Associate Director of Quality Improvement)

In 2016, for the first time in London, all the United Nations 90:90:90 targets (figure 1) were met.  London is only one of three cities globally to achieve this. Despite this great progress, 43% of all new HIV diagnoses in England are made in the capital (Public Health England, 2017, figure 2). London has recently joined the UN ‘Fast Track Cities’ initiative and aims to be the first city globally to achieve zero new HIV infections by 2030.

Figure 1. UN 90-90-90 strategy

In collaboration with ‘Healthy London Partnerships’, ELFT has been supporting an improvement collaborative bringing together 12 teams from the voluntary and healthcare sectors to work towards achieving zero infections using Quality Improvement Methods. To date, ELFT has supported QI two learning sessions with the aim of introducing quality improvement methods to the teams. However, a lot has changed since then, with COVID-19 requiring us to rapidly alter how we provide continued support to the collaborative.

On the 22^nd April the QI department in collaboration with Healthy London Partnership hosted a virtual coaching

Figure 2. London progress

session bringing together 43 representatives from 12 different organisations via ‘webex’ to see how they have all been getting on. An online survey platform, ‘menti’, was used to gain an insight into the challenges being faced by the organisations. Common themes emerged including a need to change service delivery models, grappling with virtual working and the potential for anxiety and loneliness among service users. However, despite this, those on the call also highlighted the opportunities that the pandemic has presented in their ways of working.  ‘Living Well CIC‘, who provide support to those living with HIV, shared how they had taken the opportunity to develop their virtual service delivery model to continue to support service users. Their learning from this was just how scalable this approach was and that going forward this something that they wanted to continue to deliver.

The focus of the session was to provide coaching and, in response to the previous session, some time was spent coaching aims statements that the teams had developed as part of their improvement projects.  There was some fantastic progress here and we all spent time providing feedback, encouragement and pointers around where teams could improve these. Lastly, we recapped how you can use driver diagrams to highlight your theory of change when undertaking a quality improvement project. One team also had a go at creating one – Well done to the ‘Change, Grow, Live’ team who presented their Driver Diagram on the call (Figure 3).

Figure 3. ‘Change, Grow, Live’ driver diagram

Overall, the session provided a great opportunity to virtually connect with teams working on improvement projects with similar challenges and learn together. We had some great comments from participants with Sophie from the ‘Sophia Forum‘ letting us know she “found this very helpful thank you”.