Welcome to our First Blog!
Hello, I’m delighted to welcome you to our very first Quality Assurance Blog.
We plan for this to be a space where we will share stories, reflections, ideas, and perhaps provocations, that will contribute to the world of quality assurance in particular, but quality and improving the health of the population more generally.
My name is Duncan Gilbert; I have worked here at ELFT for over 15 years now, initially as a ward manager in one of our PICUs, and for the last 3 years or so as Head of Quality Assurance. ELFT, and the healthcare landscape, have changed almost beyond recognition during that time, and over the last few months Covid has been the catalyst for further change at an unprecedented rate. It is by no means perfect, but I am extremely proud to work for such a progressive, responsive and quality orientated organisation.
We aim to connect and share with anyone who takes an interest in the experience of others in the hope that it may help improve or develop their practice. Our team will be proudly sharing our ideas, our successes, and our failures. We will be reflecting on the impact of Covid on our work and how we work, and much more. All of which we hope will help you develop your thinking around quality, and quality assurance.
Just to help set the scene and the context, I would like to take the opportunity to point you towards a recent article by our Chief Quality Officer, Dr Amar Shah, that nicely describes our approach to quality at ELFT, sets out our quality management systems, and how Quality Assurance fits in these systems. Well worth a read!
Over the coming weeks and months we will be talking about our partnership with service users and their contribution to QA at ELFT, how we have on-boarded new starters remotely during the lockdown, ELFT becoming an ‘anchor’ institution, the impact of the Black Lives Matter movement on the team and our work, delivering training and our workstreams virtually and lots more.
In time we expect to open up our blogs to comment and discussion right here on the microsite, but in the meantime we will share the links to our blogs via Twitter. If you don’t already, you can follow us @ElftQA, where we’d love to connect and explore ideas and experiences with you in more detail. We look forward to connecting with you.
All the best
Duncan
