- Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSEFT) started their improvement journey in 2021, with an organisational aim to deliver high-quality services, drive equitable access and provide opportunities for staff to grow, innovate and improve.
- MSEFT is a merged organisation that delivers acute services to a population of 1.2 million people across central and south Essex via three primary sites.
- One of the key challenges to delivering their strategic objectives was the lack of capability and capacity to deliver continuous improvement.
- A successful business case has allowed them to develop improvement capacity across the organisation, including expanding their individual improvement teams and embedding Quality, Service Improvement and Redesign (QSIR) training as their joint Quality Improvement (QI) methodology.
- Two forms of QSIR training are now offered to staff; a one-day course as well as a more intensive course taking place one day a week over five weeks which runs four times across the year.
- Improvement programmes have been wrapped directly around the training, bringing clinicians together from the three sites to work on specific issues whilst completing the intensive five-week QSIR training process.
- The improvement team are also currently delivering an ambitious programme which aims to work with sixty wards across the three sites, adding five wards every three months up until December 2024.
- Today, over 700 colleagues have been trained in QI, 469 project ideas have been received and the team have supported 45 projects to completion. There are a further 99 projects in progress.
- Positive changes are already being seen around reduction in length of stay for patients, reduction in complaints, more efficient processes, improved staff morale, stronger team relationships and an increased sense of empowerment and ability to effect change.
- Next steps include embedding co-production and patient engagement as a fundamental part of their improvement processes, as well as including metrics and data around health inequalities as part of their Quality Management System.
