Stories of improvement across CAMHS – Reflections from the IHI visit

By Matt Oultram

Staff from across CAMHS recently came together as part of a workshop to share stories of their improvement work. The group were joined by Pedro Delgado, Vice President of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI).  

We started by showcasing a Triple Aim project by the Luton CAMHS team, aimed at identifying, addressing and reducing health inequalities within the South Luton neighbourhood. One of the projects stemming from this is working with schools to improve the accessibility of Mental Health Schools Team (MHST) services for South Asian Children and Young People. The team talking about the process in which they are gathering perspectives from across the community through to developing change ideas (for more information please contact omara.baig1@nhs.net). Please find their driver diagram below.  

Further to our project discussion, the session was a great opportunity to engage with the IHI about how we develop the way we share improvement and learning from projects across the directorate. We achieved this by breaking the session up into small groups. We employed 15% solutions which is a Liberating Structures technique which invites participants to focus their idea on things is which they have control over (i.e. what is my 15%? Where do we have the freedom to act?). Using this technique, we addressed the following questions –  

– How do we improve our ability to share our improvements across the Directorate?  

– How do we avoid working in silos when improving our services?  

Lots of great ideas were produced and discussed, with some of these below 

Our next steps   

The common thread that will run through all of these ideas is some valuable feedback that we had from Pedro – that is for us to consider how we use language to demystify and simplify improvement; to use language in a way that QI can be used as a mechanism to help us overcome problems. Our next steps therefore are to go about rapidly testing these ideas, with consideration of our use of language to further progress with our improvements. We look forward to putting this into action.