CLCH launches Quality Coach Development Programme in partnership with Q community, CNWL and others
The Quality Coach Development Programme has been developed by a group of subject matter experts from across the quality improvement (QI) community in the UK, including CLCH’s QI team. The Programme aims to build improvement capability and capacity by training staff in the essential skills and knowledge needed to successfully coach teams and individuals through QI work.
The Quality Coach Development Programme launched at an online event on 28 September 2023, but has been in development for four years. The programme is a free-to-use teaching resource to support the development of skilled quality coaches for quality improvement.
Overall, 42 people from 24 organisations have contributed to the design group responsible for this work, including Sid Beech, QI Training Lead at CLCH and Associate Director at NHS Elect, Jem Ramazanoglu, Head of QI at CLCH, Robin Davis, Director at NHS Elect, Bridget Browne, Improvement Advisor at CNWL, Hannah Pearson, Improvement Facilitator at CLCH and Jen Cotter , ACP Lead at CLCH.
A recording of the webinar is available at this link.
Goal of the Programme:
By training up quality coaches, organisations can move from a dependence model, in which the QI Team are responsible for QI work and move towards an independence model. Quality coaches are a key part of this model. Working with the central QI team, the quality coaches can use a coaching style to enable improvers to be more independent in their improvement approach.
Quality coaches are frontline staff who have been trained in how to coach and support teams through QI Work – they are champions of QI at a local level and together can help us to reach more members of staff.
What is a quality coach?
The quality coach works as a conduit between frontline staff and the QI team. Quality coaches serve as a principal form of improvement support for staff, with more advanced skills and teaching offered by the QI team.
A quality coach is someone:
· with a passion for QI, who has experience of running a project
· who has dedicated time to support QI
· who teaches and explains the use of QI tools
· who works to engage people and teams in QI
· who develops and nurtures relationships based on trust and support
· who observes QI work of a team and provides guidance, support and encouragement.
You can find out more about the Quality Coach Development Programme on the Q Community’s website.
The benefits of quality coaches
Results from the second Quality Coach Pilot at CLCH showed that:
· 100% of attendees would recommend the programme to a colleague
· 100% agree that the learning from the programme will be useful to them in the future
· 100% agree that the programme has enabled them to coach improvement work
Regarding outcomes in terms of improvement, CLCH has also seen a sustained increase in QI projects with a score of 4.0 or higher using the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) assessment framework.
Owing to the many experts that were involved in the development of the programme, the project was shortlisted Best Educational Programme for the NHS in the HSJ Partnership Awards in February 2023.
Train the Trainer:
All the resources are free for anyone to download from the Q Community website and start running in their organisation. However, if more support is needed, NHS Elect will be running a ‘Train the Trainer’ programme, delivered by some of the co-designers, in November 2023 and February 2024.
For more detail about the train the trainer programme, contact Robin Davis, Director at NHS Elect robin@nhselect.org.uk or Sid Beech, Associate Director at NHS Elect sidney.beech@nhs.net.
