Clinical teams at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals have celebrated a year of improvement projects at the Trust with a special graduation ceremony at the Village Hotel.
As part of the Clinical Quality Academy ten teams from across all areas of the hospital and community spent 12 months learning the key principles of improvement science from improvement scientists’ academic experts and thought leaders and worked collaboratively with other teams in order to achieve their aims.
Each project had the aim of improving patient safety and reducing harm, using the programme learnings to make changes that will lead to better patient outcomes, system performance, patient experience and professional development.
The aims of the ten Clinical Quality projects were to:
- Significantly reduce the time from referral to effective treatment for Aortic Stenosis, a life threatening heart problem.
- Increase the number of drug and alcohol referrals from the Emergency Department to appropriate services by 50 per cent.
- Improve the competition rate of Situation Background Assessment Recommendation (SBAR) between ED and AMU.
- Increase the number of prostate cancer patients that are seen within 28 days of diagnosis and treatment effected within 62 days of diagnosis.
- Improve Same Day Emergency Care capacity at the Trust.
- Reduce the number paediatric patients admitted for overnight stays and requiring general anaesthetic for upper limb fractures.
- Increase the proportion of patients being discharged before 12 noon on the Care of the Older Person Ward.
- Introduce a Virtual Fracture Clinic at BTH and redesign how patients are triaged and seen within the system.
- Improve the availability of patient observations for people living with Cystic Fibrosis through remote monitoring.
- Bring early attention to heart failure and reducing admissions.
Chris Barben, Medical Director at Blackpool Teaching Hospitals said: “QI learning is extremely important. What it does is that it gives the clinical teams tools to be able to improve the care for patients.
“When we come to work we come to do our best for patients and we often face obstacles, difficulties, obstructions and people try and work around these things to try and improve care for patients. What the Clinical Quality Academy and the QI methodology gives us is tools to be able to understand and improve that care.
“The power of our organisation sits within these clinical teams and the power to improve sits within those clinical teams. The Clinical Quality Academy gives these teams the ways in which they can start to make those improvements themselves.”
