Jamie Stafford, Improvement Advisor, discusses what we have done at ELFT to encourage and further service users and carers participation in QI projects.
Within our organisation we’ve spent much of the last year thinking about service users and carer participation in QI projects. We have learnt that when this is ‘done right’ it can have a huge impact for the individuals involved, and also multiply a project’s likelihood of success. We have worked with service users right across our system to increase the number of Big I projects (in which a service users in a full and equal member of the project team). In support of this, we have trained over 60 service users and carers in QI methodology, and have seen service users take more active roles in QI structures than ever before, including chairing QI forums and co-designing and co-delivering our annual Quality Conference in May.
While this has felt like a huge stride in the right direction, conversation with those involved in projects sometimes highlight that there is still lots of variation in their experience of being involved in QI Projects.
As such we have begun to think about how we can better understand the qualitative aspects of involvement in QI. We are now investigating which factors are influencing people’s experience of QI, and what changes we could make to improve things. We have begun to work systematically to learn together, and plan to focus our improvement efforts on improving this experience in the year ahead.
We hope that by improving the experience of service users and carers involved in QI projects, we will be able to increase the impact of participation in QI, both for the teams and projects that they are a part of, and for the service users themselves.
If you have any thoughts about this, we’d love to hear from you – please get in contact with either the QI or People Participation teams.
