NHS Modernisation Agency Improvement Knowledge Collaboration and Event

The UK's NHS Modernisation Agency was formed in April 2001 to support the NHS and its partner organisations in the task of modernising services and improving experiences and outcomes for patients. This modernisation programme is the largest and most systematic quality improvement effort anywhere in the world, with over 150,000 NHS staff involved since 2001.

Modernisation is now embedded in the NHS with many front line staff having gained the skills to improve services. The time is now right for modernisation to move into its next phase, which will place greater emphasis on local implementation and the devolution of skills and resources to support this. The government have asked the MA to work with local health trusts and other stakeholders to develop a detailed plan to implement this vision, which it is hoped will place continuous improvement at the heart of the NHS.

Devising more effective ways to share improvement knowledge will be a vital element in this process, and so the Modernisation Agency has embarked upon a month-long open conversation aimed at identifying the key ideas, techniques and tools that will help them coordinate the work of improvement knowledge leaders in the field. This process will inform the debate and prepare for a national improvement knowledge event on May 26 at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre in London.

Headshift have helped the MA create a simple Weblog-driven consultation web site to support this process, and we would invite anybody with relevant experience and knowledge from other countries or comparable sectors to contribute their thoughts and comments.

The key questions we have addressed so far are:

• Social networking: what kind of improvement leaders network do we want and how might this be supported?
• Mobilising knowledge: how can we share knowledge quickly and effectively? How can we create a culture of knowledge sharing throughout the NHS? What makes a learning organisation?
• Collaborative working: What conditions are required for collaboration to thrive? How do you move collaboration on into effective, quality assured good practice? How can collaborative working ensure that patients in the NHS receive the best care in the best place by the right person?
• Promoting innovation: What are the drivers and inhibitors to innovation? How do we capture, evaluate, spread and sustain innovation to improve healthcare delivery? How does an organisation evolve from one that improves to one that innovates?

Additional issues that will be covered later this month include:

• How to measure the success of improvement knowledge sharing
• How to encapsulate what has been learned so far

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