QI Community

It works through time-banking: If you offer your time or skills to someone else, you get an hour of time to ‘spend’ on Hexitime for QI mentorship, support or teaching in return. The space can also be used to simply connect, share and discuss topics or threads through direct and group messaging. 

By joining the RCPCH QI Community, colleagues across the UK and internationally can connect and collaborate with each other and the College, regardless of location, finances or role, sharing ideas, skills and mentorship and ultimately supporting each other to improve health and healthcare for infants, children and young people.

Members can make requests, offers, and take up offers, from others in the RCPCH QI Community, and in the wider Hexitime site, which has over 3,000 national healthcare improvement and innovation members. The RCPCH QI Community is open to all RCPCH members from students, foundation doctors and paediatric trainees, through to consultants, and seniors members – alongside our Affiliate Members working with children and young people in any role. Read about the RCPCH membership types and become an RCPCH member. 

The RCPCH Hexitime Hub will also provide opportunities to learn about and engage with improvement and safety work led by the College, with any contributions to College requests receiving a letter of recognition. 

An RCPCH member will log in, set up offers that, if taken up, provide them with additional token of time. They can also set up requests, which can be accepted, costing a tokens. Everyone starts with 10 tokens of time to ‘spend’! 

You can also initiate messages with other members, create topic threads, or even sub-groups for certain networks, projects or collaborations.  

How to join:

1. Download the How-to-Join Guide above
2. Follow this link to the RCPCH QI Community
3. Click ‘Apply Now’ and complete the short application. 

Once RCPCH membership is confirmed, you can browse and take up existing offers from other members, and make offers and requests of your own.  

Once you’ve joined, please: 

• Make  at least 1 offer and 1 request 

• Take up at least 1 existing offer 

• Share within your networks and encourage colleagues to join! (Why not circulate or print out the poster at the bottom of the page and put it up in your clinical or educational area?) 

• Become champions for the community 

Examples of different offers and requests: 

• Foundation doctor: Make a request for help to strengthen the QI section of your paediatric application.  

• Core trainee: Get help planning a QI project using our CYP ‘voice bank’. Share your method with another trainee.   

• Stepping up trainee: Learn about leadership for QI from an improvement coach. Help someone improve their QI abstract for conference.  

• Consultant: Take up a request to write a blog for the RCPCH Safety eBulletin.  Speak to the College QI team about effective QI supervision for trainees.
• Trust Quality and Safety Lead: Offer to share your experiences with a new quality and safety lead in another Trust. Take up an offer of collaboration in an RCPCH-led national QI collaborative responding to Regulation 28 reports.

How to make offers:

How to make requests:

How to take up someone’s offer:

If you accept an offer, check whether it’s from someone in the QI Community. If they are within the community, please accept their offer via the network page instead of the main site. This helps us track activity in the network to support the evaluation of the QI Community.

You can skip scheduling if you don’t know when to suggest a time, and talk to the person in a chat to find a time together.

How to make and respond to Threads:

Born out of one paediatrician’s deeply life-changing experience of burnout, Hexitime aims to save staff time and effort to upskill in transformative improvement methods using a time-banking model. If you give your time, you receive a token to receive time and expertise from other RCPCH members.  

Hexitime was created and established by Hesham Abdulla (UK trained paediatrician, and prior head of Quality Improvement at Oxford University Hospitals) and John Lodge (prior NHS England Head of Quality Improvement (London)). Hexitime was developed through funding from both the Health Foundation’s Q community and NHS England’s Clinical Entrepreneur Programme (CEP) accelerator programme.  

Watch this TedX talk, by co-founder Hesham Abdulla, giving the background of Hexitime and how it works. 

• Network –  Share experience and knowledge with people with different backgrounds, roles, and skillsets in an improvement context.     
• Collaborate –  Nationally and internationally on QI and safety work  

• Gain knowledge and mentorship –  To support high quality paediatric QI projects. 

• Strengthen the quality of your QI/safety work – Which may increase chances of presentations and publications  

• Contribute – To  College led QI and safety work  

• Membership evidence of CPD and QI/safety engagement – For CVs, and appraisals 

Generic educational resources are great, but learning from each other is better!  

Small scale pilots of using Hexitime across the Q Community have left members inspired, better resourced, and equipped with new ideas.  

Listen to a 2 minute podcast that explains Hexitime from a Junior Doctors perspective here! 

The RCPCH are running this QI community as a 1 year pilot – it will be as good as we make it! 

Supporting our members and wider workforce to continuously and effectively improve healthcare quality for our children and young people is core to our College Strategy and RCPCH QI strategy. 

 We have some fantastic resources on the QI Central and Patient Safety Portal already, which we’re constantly updating, but we heard in the last members survey that QI support and upskilling, and continued professional development (CPD), remain priorities for you and we know that QI opportunities training and support can vary between settings.  

 To address this, we have launched the paediatric improvement community, hosted on Hexitime, which facilitates and rewards collaboration and sharing of skills, so that we can work together to improve the safety and quality of care for infants, children and young people, and evidence your CPD and teaching/coaching for e-portfolio and appraisals.  

Instead of trying to find ways to upskill in QI and safety with training courses or finding the right colleagues to collaborate with, Hexitime brings together like-minded colleagues nationally. This allows staff to upskill in their own time, learning and sharing their experiences between colleagues and teams ‘on the ground’ in the NHS. We can teach each other much faster and reliably than learning from a screen, anyway!