Dr Nicola Burgess, Warwick Business School, and Helen Gilbert, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, will talk about using quality improvement methods to rapidly improve turnaround times for Covid-19 testing.
We plan to talk about how Helen applied her knowledge and experience of quality improvement methods to rapidly improve turnaround times for Covid-19 testing. Leeds is one of the five hospitals that partnered (alongside NHS England and Improvement) with the Virginia Mason Institute to develop a culture of sustainable continuous improvement capability.
Although the partnership (for which Nicola is leading the evaluation) has seen many successes, one of the drawbacks has been around the pace of change. What this example shows is that when you invest in skills over a sustained period, those skills can then be applied effectively and efficiently to drive rapid and sustained process improvement.