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July Trustwide QI Forum: People Participation in QI

 19th July 2019

Shanaiz Khatun, John Kauzeni, Susan Alfred and Nynn-Hui Chang

This month’s Trustwide QI forum focused on people participation. Project teams from across the Trust came together to share their project experiences demonstrating the positive impact people participation has had on their QI projects. Taking place in Youthscape, Luton, the forum took the form of a World Café. Project teams presented their projects to a rotating audience over the space of a few hours, sharing challenges, successes and stories!

John Kauzeni, People Participation Lead at ELFT and Shanaiz Khatun, a service user and peer mentor at ELFT, from Tower Hamlet Community Health Services shared their team’s story and processes on getting 100% service user involvement in QI projects and the invaluable expertise they bring. Shanaiz explained that “as service users, we are the key to what teams are planning and the fact that we are listened to and brought on board is invaluable”.

The project team from Wardown Community Mental Health Team explained that building a team that includes carers and service users is essential in order to provide a wider understanding of the community and the issues it faces. Since the beginning of their Reshaping Community Services project, the team have seen an 8% increase in service user and carer satisfaction, meaning they are well on their way to reaching their aim of 90% of Staff and Service Users to report satisfaction with the care they provide and receive.

Using QI to fix QI with Craig Donohue

When Craig Donohoe, a Service User, heard that Luton QI Forum needed a new chair he decided to put his name forward: “I decided to push myself out of my comfort zone, I knew I could be a good chair I just needed the opportunity”. Craig has now successfully chaired two QI Forums in Luton and is training others to do the same, with his handy ‘Top 5 tips for chairing meetings’.

The QI Luton forum has been completely revolutionised; At the start of this process only 1 out of 10 projects had service user input, now 8 out of 10 have SU involvement in 7 months.

Ash Ward’s project team from Bedfordshire and Luton asked themselves how they could work better together in order to improve a patient’s average length of stay. By using a Visual Bed Management Board with patient information they have managed to get the average length of stay down from 25.3 days to 10.9 days.

Newham North CRT aimed to reduce stress of their staff and their service users at their Well Being Clinic. The team made it clear that having a service user involved in their project made everything run so much smoother. They felt safer and more confident in their decisions knowing that everyone effected was equally represented.

Involvement has been proven as key to successful QI and we can say that a project is 4 times more likely to succeed when service users and carers are involved. They bring a completely unique view of the system to the project team, a view we would not have without them.

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