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Project

Quality improvement in mental health care

Quality improvement involves designing and redesigning work processes and systems that deliver health care with better outcomes and lower cost, wherever this can be achieved. The King’s Fund has called for the widespread adoption of quality improvement approaches in order to improve patients’ experiences of care at a time of increasing financial and workforce pressures. It is important that mental health care trusts are included in this.

Our aims with this project were to:

  • promote better understanding of quality improvement within the mental health care sector

  • understand how and why some mental health care trusts have already embraced quality improvement strategies

  • distil some practical lessons about successfully embedding quality improvement more widely in mental health trusts.

Project content

  • Quality improvement in mental health

    Quality improvement is not a quick fix, and creating the type of cultural change needed to adapt an organisation's whole approach to quality does take time, says Shilpa Ross.

  • Quality improvement in practice: lessons from mental health

    Quality improvement is a systematic approach to improving health care based on an iterative process of continuous testing, measurement, learning and change. In this video we speak to qua...

  • Quality improvement in mental health

    Quality improvement is not a quick fix, and creating the type of cultural change needed to adapt an organisation's whole approach to quality does take time, says Shilpa Ross.

What we did

In this project, we are particularly focusing on clinical and non-clinical leaders in NHS mental health care trusts to understand how they can help build a culture of quality improvement within their organisations.

Our approach to this work was to:

  • engage with leaders from NHS mental health care trusts, as well as experts in the field of quality improvement, to establish how capability for quality improvement can been built most effectively

  • capture the learning from this process in a report, to be published in spring 2017.

How we can work with your organisation

Project team