Here’s another live post from the NHS Hackday in Cardiff.  More detail on what the hackday is about can be found in this post.  Other material from the day can be found through Twitter under the hashtag #nhshd.

This is an idea from Doctors Conrad Lee (@ckwl1) and Michael George (@drmgeorge87) around how you could make better use of the learning from Quality Improvement Audits that Doctors take part in during their training.

Here’s the situation: 

• Doctors (and others) carry out Quality Improvement Audits as part of their continued professional development,
• There are situations where these audits are not completed, written up and shared,
• There are many good reasons for this like; people move on to new departments (rotation), or new hospitals,
• Valuable learning is lost. The figure of only 15% of audits ever being completed was mentioned a few times.

Here’s a possible solution: Conrad, Micheal and a team are working on developing a ‘QI Hub. This will  be an online platform where people can share the details of the quality improvement audits they have been working on. This has huge potential to:

• Act as a resource for sharing the learning from those audits that have been completed;
• Be a library for audits not completed, so that new people can build upon the work that someone has already started (there must be a good reason why someone thought it was worth looking at in the first place);
• Developing as a tool to support project management and tracking was suggested and
• Opening it up so that NHS Patients can view QI Hub was mentioned. (I wonder if this might look a bit like Dell IdeaStorm or My StarbucksIdea?)

And it could be scalable: There is a lot of potential here to improve the sharing of knowledge from an activity that lots of people are involved in. Last year I went to a Quality and Improvement Day at Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board. I was very impressed by the amount of knowledge that I saw shared through the poster displays and presentations they used.

One question did occur to me though, “how does this incredible learning find its way across the Health Board, and beyond?”. Maybe Conrad and Michael have something that might help?

You can follow the progress of the QI Hub on Twitter at #openqi

The people helping Conrad and Michael are: Jo Carter (@Jo_Carter64); Craig Thomas (@tinybigideas); Sebastian Yuan (@S3baster); Nick Theodorou (@NickTheodorou).