Hamilton announces Improvement Institute

Date published: 12 November 2015

Among the medical conference delegates was key note speaker Sir Liam Donaldson, whose report "The Right Time, The Right Place" highlighted a future vision of Health and Social Care in Northern Ireland.

Coinciding with World Quality Day, the Minister outlined as he did last week his vision for ensuring the quality of health and social care throughout Northern Ireland.

The Health Minister said: "There is a strong will and ambition amongst organisations and individuals to deliver on quality and to improve the experience of service users. This is reflected in the responses to Sir Liam’s report. I want to encourage the growth of improvement expertise through, for example, support to both individual clinicians and organisations to work more effectively together to deliver improvement.

"There are numerous examples where individual clinicians, teams of clinicians and HSC organisations have driven forward innovative improvements in how we deliver health and social care services. I want to harness and build on their efforts as we move forward."

Announcing steps to implement an Improvement Institute, designed to drive forward innovative improvements in how health and social care services are delivered the Minister continued: "I believe a greater regional focus with regional leadership would better facilitate, support and build capacity in individuals and within organisations to drive quality improvement and standardisation into the future.

"I have therefore decided to develop an Improvement Institute to lead on this work, designating ‘Northern Ireland as a Centre for Excellence’ as a key theme under the Department’s Quality 2020 strategy, the implementation of which is led by chief professionals in the Department with representation from across the HSC.

"Under this theme Quality 2020 will support and develop the existing Improvement Network, building capacity and experience amongst individual clinicians across the HSC, to deliver on improvement and innovation and in parallel to develop an Improvement Partnership bringing organisations within the HSC together to work more cohesively and collaboratively on developing innovations and improvements and sharing best practice.

"The intention is to build on the emerging improvement and innovation hubs in each Trust and have a network that will link them and the individuals involved together regionally. The network will aim to support individual clinicians to develop their skills and expertise in delivering innovation and quality improvements and to share these skills and expertise with others."