At the end of May 2024, we held our first joint Quality and Improvement conference in London where over 200 members attended. Our theme, 'North Star', directed our focus towards embedding quality and improvement seamlessly into patient care. With a gathering of trust leaders from diverse sectors, we explored how ongoing service pressures impact the quality of care.  

The below visual illustration captures the key insights and themes that were explored throughout the day. (Access the full image using the download button below)

[Artist: Laura Broderick ] 

Capturing the benefits and articulating the value of improvements 

In our third plenary session, Professor Helen Bevan shared her reflections on the importance of defining value in continuous improvement work, and discussed why strong economic cases for improvement need to be made, alongside the social and business cases. Continuous improvement programmes that are successful will be embedded into the strategic priorities of organisations, and this process will always be better where organisations and systems share an understanding of the value of such programmes - efficiencies and economic considerations should form part of this understanding. 

See Helen's publication, 'Defining and demonstrating value from continuous improvement in the NHS'. 

Other resources 

• We had 6 trusts sharing their case studies on the ways in which trusts have used systematic improvement approaches to meet organisation-wide priorities. Learn more about our Showcase finalists and their case studies here. 

• Check out recordings and slides from the conference sessions here.