Quality Improvement

What is Quality Improvement, or QI?

Quality Improvement (QI) is simply about doing things differently to make them better, safer, more effective, and efficient. At Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust, we place QI at the heart of everything we do and understand that true QI depends on engaging, empowering, and equipping our staff with the permission, resources, skills, and tools to influence change.

What does this mean for the Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust?

The idea of a QI Hub initially came back through staff feedback. We want everyone to have the QI skills to know how to access support and to ensure we place quality at the centre of everything we do.

As part of our Strategy, we have ‘Journey of Improvement’ as a key aim. This continues our drive to embed a culture of learning, leadership, and improvement across the Trust with the aim to grow our culture of quality improvement to enhance the quality and efficiency of our care to drive improvements in patient care and safety.

How do we use QI at the Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust?

Our QI Hub have developed a 6 steps model devised from evidence-based Quality Improvement, to guide anyone through an incremental improvement approach.

  1. Problem: Discuss and understand the problem, issue, or opportunity.
  2. Aim: What do you want to achieve?
  3. Measures: How will you measure the benefits? How will you know you’ve made an improvement?
  4. Generate Change Ideas: Using different tools to help generate change ideas to ensure your idea is a success.
  5. Test, learn and implement: implementing successful and sustainable change following the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle.
  6. Celebrate and share: Tell your story and share your learning with others.

What does this QI journey mean for our patients and staff?

For patients, we feel this will mean:

  • The care we give will feel high quality
  • Our patients and carers will be involved and support us in making improvements in how we deliver our services
  • Our services will feel more efficient

For our staff, we feel this will mean:

  • There will be more opportunities to get involved in improvements
  • Our staff have the autonomy to put forward ideas, can make positive changes and will be supported.

Get involved

If you’d like to find out more about how you can get involved with Quality Improvement for Royal Cornwall Hospital Trust or have an improvement idea go to:

For patients: Head over to our Patient Experience page and get in touch.

For staff: Head over to our Intranet page and contact us directly. Search for ‘Help and Support’ on the intranet – the first result currently is the QI Hub Help and Support page, which is the page you are looking for.

Page last reviewed: 31 March 2023

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