Job Description
Are you looking for a new and exciting challenge? Are you passionate about working together with colleagues and patients to deliver improvements to services? Do you have the leadership skills and energy to facilitate change at a large acute hospital?
We are offering two new permanent opportunities to join our dynamic Quality Improvement Team. As part of a wider Transformation Team, our aim is to develop and embed a culture of continuous quality improvement, supporting the Trust’s ambition to provide high quality care to every patient, every day.
Working as part of the Quality Improvement (QI) Team, you will be instrumental in supporting delivery of the Trust’s 5-year Trust and QI Strategies. As a Quality Improvement Manager, you will provide leadership and QI expertise to clinical/professional and corporate teams, supporting application of QI tools and methodology to ensure delivery of measurable outcomes against divisional and organisational priorities.
Working as part of the Quality Improvement (QI) Team, you will be instrumental in supporting delivery of the Trust’s 5-year Trust and QI Strategies. As a Quality Improvement Manager, you will provide leadership and QI expertise to clinical/professional and corporate teams, supporting application of QI tools and methodology to ensure delivery of measurable outcomes against divisional and organisational priorities.
You will play a key role in four main areas of support that the Quality improvement team provides to the Trust:
- Direct support to front line services to transform and improve the quality of the service they provide to patients
- Development and delivery of Qi projects that may span multiple service areas
- Support to embed QI methodologies in projects and programmes designed to deliver our strategic priorities
- Building quality improvement capability in our workforce through the design and delivery of development programmes, training, mentoring and
Lewisham and Greenwich NHS Trust is a community focused provider of local and acute care, providing high quality services to over one million people living across the London boroughs of Lewisham, Greenwich and Bexley. With a turnover of around £700 million, we provide services at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Woolwich, University Hospital Lewisham and a range of community settings in Lewisham. We also provide some services at Queen Mary’s Hospital in Sidcup.
As an organisation, we’ve made significant improvements for patients and staff in the last two and-a-half years. This is reflected in our most recent Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspection (from February 2020), which found improvements across the organisation and gave us an improved rating of “Good” in the Well-Led and Effective domains, in addition to the rating of “Good” that we had already achieved in the Caring domain. Our staff culture change programme has been key to the Trust’s improvement journey, as we’ve stabilised our workforce by reducing vacancy rates and improving staff retention. We’ve also significantly increased the representation of minority ethnic leaders across our clinical and corporate teams.
Main duties and Responsibilities
- Provide leadership, facilitation and specialist support to teams undertaking improvement projects and programmes with improvement elements, using QI methodology to maximise engagement, impact and learning
- Work collaboratively with clinical, non-clinical, corporate and managerial colleagues at all levels within the organization, alongside the Senior QI Lead to identify quality improvement opportunities and opportunities for scale and spread
- Manage a portfolio of QI projects that may span multiple service areas and prepare reports and analyses where required
- Work with project sponsors to set time scales and project deliverables which are reviewed regularly and take corrective action where required
- Support the development and delivery of the QI teaching programme to provide high quality training to staff, patients and carers in improvement methods and tools
- Design and provide bespoke adhoc training in quality improvement for a range of audiences and programmes
- Actively encourage co-production in projects where appropriate and support with the identification of patient representatives
- Provide expert support in the measurement and use of data for improvement in QI projects. Work with frontline teams on the identification, collection, analysis and interpretation of data for use in the monitoring or the impact of the projects. This will include presenting data in a variety of formats, namely statistical process control charts.
- Support the Associate Director of QI alongside the wider team to develop, update and maintain the Trust wide QI programme plan.
Other tasks and duties
- Design, deliver or participate in divisional workshops and events to share good practice, showcase improvements and raise the profile of QI
- Participate in external networking groups and opportunities the share and learn
- Participate in the team’s collective planning and delivery of the annual improvement showcase and associated events/tasks
- Create and maintain up to date project-related documentation and progress, including use of LifeQI. Escalate any risks or barriers to the Senior QI Lead or Project sponsor when appropriate.
- Help to raise the profile of QI through the use of tools/platforms like social media, the QI newsletter, Improvement Hub and other internal and external communications
- Play an active role in the writeup and submission of projects for publication and support development of associated material in preparation for journals and events
- Develop resources to support engagement and widespread use of QI tools and methodology
- To take an active part in meetings, workshops and presentations for a wide variety of audiences, demonstrating consistently high qualities of communication and persuasiveness skills.
- To analyse data from various sources, interpret / evaluate to propose a range of options, conveying complex information in a simple and understandable manner.
- To maintain an up to date knowledge of best practice as well as local and national policies regarding improvement.
- To manage own workload and priorities and re-negotiate as appropriate. To be proactive in gathering agreed information. To take the initiative in proposing methodologies, approaches and technologies within own area of expertise.
- Participate in training and development opportunities as identified
- Participate in shadowing of services where appropriate to support knowledge and identification of improvement opportunities
- Deliver project management work for other projects and programmes as required
Communications and Relationships
The QI Managers will have on-going communication with:
- Divisional triumvirate management team
- Senior leaders including Heads of Nursing, Managers, Clinical Directors, Heads of Profession
- Priority programme leads
- Wider transformation and strategy team
- Divisional governance leads
- Practice Development Leads
- Internal Communication team
- Learning and Development Team
- Wider QI community external to the Trust
- System partners
- Patients, families and carers
- Quality workstream leads including colleagues from Patient Experience, Patient Safety and Quality Assurance