Workstreams

Measurement and Understanding

So often in quality improvement initiatives it is impossible to identify whether real improvements have been delivered and sustained. Quantitative and qualitative data can provide measurement and understanding of quality improvement initiatives, to demonstrate their value and how they have worked. This workstream aims to help the renal community measure and understand quality improvement initiatives. To achieve this, it has the following responsibilities:

  • Working with the project team and stakeholders to identify the priority areas for QI
  • Developing a balanced set of practical and realistic measures including clinical processes and outcomes, patient safety, patient-reported and economic measures, which complement the UKRR dataset to measure quality improvement.
  • Developing new approaches for collecting these data, if required
  • Identifying tools and resources in use within the renal community to measure and understand quality improvement and evaluating these tools and resources
  • Supporting national and regional projects in the application of the appropriate quantitative and qualitative methodologies
  • For specific projects, facilitate the identification of the correct measures to implement, understanding of the data produced and continuation of regular measurement to identify variation over time
  • Within measurement and understanding, considering the utilisation of data by the whole spectrum of stakeholders, including patients, health care professionals, the unregistered workforce and commissioners
  • Working with KQuIP to support measurement of the process of KQuIP and the quality improvement initiatives it supports
  • Establishing a national infrastructure for audit and quality improvement through the kidney network
  • Developing the quantitative and qualitative skills within the renal community to test whether measurable improvements have been achieved and how this is achieved

Our offer to stakeholders

We aim to promote measurement and understanding of quality improvement initiatives within the renal community, providing advice on how to measure quality improvement, how to interpret this measurement correctly and how to measure why the initiative has worked. The benefits of this approach include:

  • Provision of evidence that the quality improvement initiative works / does not work, ensuring good practice is encouraged and poor practice is reduced
  • Enables more effective and efficient working
  • Ensure stakeholders find the measurement relevant and meaningful
  • Identification of what is successful, so it can be spread across the renal community to promote and share best practice

Benefits for individual stakeholders can include:

Patients / Patient groups

  • Ensure measures of quality improvement are balanced and relevant to patients’ needs and priorities
  • Ensure that quality improvement initiatives improve patient outcomes and experience

Deliverers of care

  • Facilitate development of their skills in measuring quality improvement initiatives
  • Support them in measuring and understanding quality improvement

Managers of Care

  • Promote structured and effective quality improvement initiatives, with demonstrated benefits
  • Provide focus for quality improvement initiatives, guided through evidence of what works

Commissioners

  • Promote demonstration of what is effective and efficient care
  • Demonstrate the value added to patient care through quality improvement initiatives

Policy Makers

  • Identify what is best practice with evidence to support this which can contribute to recommendations and policy development
  • Facilitate balanced measures of quality improvement that consider the effect on patient reported outcomes, patient safety, clinical outcomes and demonstrate the economic benefit

To achieve these benefits we aim to:

  • Develop a repository of measures that can be utilised for kidney healthcare QI projects. These measures will include clinical outcomes, patient reported outcomes, patient safety measures and economic measures. The group will evaluate tools added to ensure they are robust
  • Identify data collection methods that make data meaningful to all stakeholders
  • Provide education on measurement and understanding of QI projects for the kidney community
  • Facilitate regional and national projects in the measurement and understanding of larger quality improvement initiatives
  • Explore how the UKRR dataset can be used and expanded to support quality improvement in the renal community