Oxford Healthcare Improvement
Supporting Oxford Health to provide safe, better quality care to its patients and improve the working lives of its staff.
About us
Oxford Healthcare Improvement
Oxford Healthcare Improvement (OHI) Centre aims to support the Trust in providing outstanding care of people in hospital, in the community and their homes. The long-term vision is to build sustainable quality improvement through collaborative working and strategic partnerships.
Sustainable quality improvement (QI) considers feedback from the staff, service users, carers and families that are part of Oxford Health. Utilising this feedback to identify, test and implement tests of changes to improve the quality of healthcare. Our coaching in projects and training programmes seek to build capability at all levels in the Trust and give every staff member the opportunity to participate in QI training. We embrace a learning culture that focuses on local need, using established QI methods and taking an evidence-based approach to healthcare.
Alongside this, we seek to create strategic partnerships with universities, health and social care providers, commissioners, the academic health science network, patient safety collaborative and industry partners.
Collaboration
We work with national and international organisations, universities, health and social care providers, commissioners, the academic health science network, patient safety collaborative and industrial partners.
The need
- To meet the needs of patients, families and staff at local level. Everyone has stories of problems they would like to fix, improvements they would like to make ‘if only I had the time’ and ‘if only I knew how’. Operational priorities are always critical but, alongside this, all organisations need a capacity for longer term problem solving.
- A host of organisations including the Care Quality Commission, NHS England and other NHS leaders realise the NHS needs to substantially increase its capacity to learn, reflect and to make sustainable long-term improvements. The NHS is brilliant at short-term firefighting and managing immediate crisis. This is necessary but we also need a capacity to deal with long term vulnerabilities in the system, which cause distress, harm, waste and staff exhaustion.
Forward thinking
OHI has been formed to work with everyone in the Trust to support the development of this longer-term improvement capacity. We do this by:
- Training and support to lead improvement projects. We run a ‘Leading Improvement’ programme over one year and a ‘Frontline programme’ over six months and contribute to many other Trust courses.
- Collaborative improvement projects with Trust teams to define and analyse a problem, develop measures and interventions, implement change programmes, sustain and spread changes over time.
- Horizon scanning for future projects and identifying stakeholders, literature review, measurement, data analysis, leadership support, and longer term sustainability.
Learn more
In light of the recent COVID-19 pandemic OHI have undergone a strategic review of how QI is supported, facilitated and embedded within our services. This concluded that OHI would benefit from being located alongside other trust services and therefore the team will be working remotely and where possible on location with the clinical teams dependent on COVID restrictions.