Tips for success
Education
Within every domain you will find an education section with short videos which give you the knowledge you need to undertake the quality improvement work. We recommend that these are viewed by the whole practice team.
Look at your baseline data
The following applies to practices in England.
Open Prescribing has prescribing data under “Greener NHS” measures. You can view how your practice compares to others in your sub-ICB region or nationally.
For primary care network level data, the NHS ‘PCN Deep Dive’ site is very helpful and you can sign up if you have an nhs email.
Whole team approach
Quality improvement requires a whole team approach. How is inhaler prescribing and asthma care currently managed within your practice? Think about the patient journey through diagnosis, management and review. Which members of the team are currently involved in asthma care? Consider the diagram below.
Which projects will have the greatest potential for improvement in care? Which staff members need to be involved? How will the information be sent out and who will arrange this? It’s a good idea to ensure there is a named clinician for each project so that staff know where to direct their own or patient queries. You may need to adapt the project ideas to better fit the processes and resources within your practice and the specific needs of your patient population.
Use a SUSQI approach
The Centre for Sustainable Healthcare describes sustainable clinical healthcare as that which reduces the carbon footprint of care whilst improving the quality of care. This can either be done by reducing the need for healthcare or making healthcare more efficient. They have developed a driver diagram to help plan quality improvement for sustainable clinical healthcare. We have added some ideas for sustainable quality improvement in asthma care. You can access a blank diagram here.
Remember to measure improvement
QI is all about making small changes, monitoring improvement, and then changing again. This is reflected in the Plan-Do-Study-Act model of QI. Read more about the PDSA approach to quality improvement here.