Quality Improvement Strategy
Our Quality Improvement Strategy highlights the College's vision and aims to enhance services and ensure better patient outcomes through collaborative and sustainable improvement, using data together with improvement science.
We provide support for hospital-based quality improvements using nationally-gathered data to help our members deliver real time, measurable improvements. Alongside this we provide training in improvement science, and support making improvements at a local level.
Our aims
1. To unite the anaesthetic and wider health and care community around key priorities for quality improvement. To develop networks and links with other Colleges and organisations.
The College has a responsibility to understand and support the learning needs of those leading improvement. We aim to achieve this through:
- Implementation of action learning and leadership coaching to build improved capabilities.
- Ensuring quality improvement is incorporated throughout College guidance including ACSA, GPAS, and the launch of the QI Compendium.
- Establishing 'Breakthrough Collaborative Programmes'.
- Collaboration with partner organisations and their members to bring together shared interests and improve anaesthesia services across the UK.
- Ensure that the patient voice is at the heart of our influencing quality improvement and policy projects.
2. To improve access to quality improvement training resources and to advance knowledge and skills by developing a repository of quality improvement activity and resources to facilitate learning and sharing best practice.
We aim to equip anaesthetists with the skills to undertake quality improvement work in alignment with the College’s Education, Training and Examinations Strategy 2018-2023. This includes:
- Providing educational resources and courses covering the areas of quality improvement within the anaesthetic curriculum, or other specific quality improvement topics as required by the specialty.
- Developing guidance for both trainees and trainers on improvement science to ensure the delivery of the College curriculum requirements.
- Promoting quality improvement through a range of educational activities including webinars and podcasts.
3. To strengthen and develop the links between anaesthetists working on quality improvement.
We aim to close the gap between data measurement and use of quality data for improvement by:
- Delivering national quality improvement programmes such as the Perioperative Quality Improvement Programme (PQIP), and by supporting its wider adoption by the medical and healthcare profession.
- Facilitate development of quality improvement by sharing examples of best practice and help local providers make the best possible use of audit/research results.
- Increasing the availability of quality improvement resources including PQIP and the National Emergency Laparotomy Audit (NELA) quality improvement animations, the online quality improvement dashboard, workshops and webinars.
- Encouraging and supporting cross project working through the quality network.
- Utilising existing, embedded research project data to implement improvements in care.
- Expanding patient and public involvement in research with the creation of patient specific resources.
4. To raise the profile of quality improvement in the specialty and help anaesthetists to gain recognition of their quality improvement work.
It is our goal to unite the anaesthetic and wider health and care community around key priorities for quality improvement.
- Develop improvement links within each anaesthetic department through the quality network and QuARCs
- Provide an online platform for the quality network to facilitate the sharing of local initiatives and best practice.
The full strategy can be accessed and downloaded below