RCPCH Conference 2019 – QI Highlights

‘Embedding a culture of quality improvement’ – a 3 hour seminar featuring 9 top-scoring QI abstracts submitted to the conference this year. The keynote speaker was Dr Jonny Taitz, Director of  Paediatric Patient Safety at the NSW Clinical Excellence Commission, Australia, with a talk on broad system improvement. The session also featured presentations on the SAFE patient safety programme, originally created by RCPCH, now rolled out in the Republic of Ireland via the Royal College of Physicians, Ireland and the RCPCH Diabetes Quality Programme.

Dr Peter Lachman, the CEO of the International Society for Quality in Healthcare (ISQua) and Dr Pierre Barker, Chief Global Partnerships and Programmes Officer at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), facilitated discussion and commented on the presented projects. Dr Barker has distinguished three abstracts, whose authors have received certificates of excellence

‘Quality and Safety of UHC is a Public Health issue’ – this session was organised jointly with the British Association of Child and Adolescent Public Health (BACAPH) and focused on the provision of quality Universal Health Coverage (UHC), in line with the current WHO campaign. Universal Health coverage UHC is a focus of the WHO programmes. There have been three major reports on UHC and the quality of healthcare worldwide calling for  improvements in healthcare delivery. In this session, hosting the WHO’s Dr Matthew Neilson and Dr Ingrid Wolfe, the chair of BACAPH,  the concept of Safe high quality UHC was examined in a global context as well as in a reflective way for the UHC we have in place in the UK.

‘Human Face of Improving Care. Patient voice in planning and delivering Quality Improvement.’ – this session explored the importance of including patient experience and involving patient voice in QI interventions, through examples of projects where this was the case, presented by Matthew James from WellChild and Dr Charlotte Elder of Sheffield Children’s Hospital. Matthew James presented on a prototype app co-designed with parents of children on polypharmacy (you can find more information on the app below), supporting safe medicines management. Dr Elder shared the role of patient feedback in the set-up of a QI project aiming to increase patient education and self-care skills in paediatric diabetes.