Intro blog

18 comments

cholesterol

“I have recently discovered i have a very high cholesterol level (around 7) from my first well man test on the NHS (for 40+ – get one if you haven’t already). I’ve now got to change my diet and possibly take statins so after 40 years of excellent health & eating what I wanted – I am now a patient.”

This is an introductory blog & my opening confession is an example of what this blog is about. Sharing a tip about something that has helped (the well man test), encouraging proactive / preventative medicine (early detection), change management (diet/statins) and improving patient care / outcomes – that’s where our network comes in. If you don’t know who we (N-QI-CAN) are please check out our website &/or our annual report – in summary we are a network of quality improvement professionals working across England. 

I am the national chair (& a clinical audit manager in the day) & during my first 12 months in the role – there has been times when events have occurred and I needed more than 180 characters of a tweet to respond. Don’t get me wrong I think twitter is excellent but there have a few times when I know my tweets have been misinterpreted due to the lack of words allowed. Yes I have sent out emails / spoken to leads but in a changing nhs & an age of transparency – it is important that all forms of communication are consider and the most appropriate used – especially if we need to communicate to those outside our network (email groups).

So I have set this blog up as part of our objectives for 2017 to aid communication & sharing across our networks.

hny-2017-nqican-priorities

I am writing this intro & I have further blogs planned soon (pitfalls of analysing data using samples, explaining why clinical audit is many things for different people etc) but I envisage and will encourage others from our networks to write on here. Our mersey clinical audit network chair Michael Spry wrote a successful & insightful blog on the HQIP pages during clinical audit awareness week in 2015 about life as a audit manager – & this is the type of sharing and insight that I will be encouraging.

Anyway lets hope this posts ok and please say hi on the comments board below – feel free to leave ideas that you would like us to write/blog about or advise about how I can control my high cholesterol / which statins are best 😉

Carl Walker – National Quality Improvement & Clinical Audit Network Chair

nqican

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18 comments

  1. Hi Carl
    As a new Q community member I am looking for IT solutions to support a community of interest for To Dip or Not To Dip, a QI programme that’s being rapidly adopted and adapted across parts of the NHS. Any ideas? Needs to allow all to network and share/ deposit resources and data (no PID) So far Slack been suggested. Anyone got other suggestions?
    PS As a pharmacist My answer is atorvastatin !

    Reply

    1. Thanks for your comments / advice on statins Elizabeth. This is not something we have discussed specifically at our national meeting in terms of something that we can recommend. Please email us (nqican@gmail.com) further details and we will discuss with our members and advise accordingly. You will need to be mindful of info governance issues if you are sharing data and need a host trust to manage the data securely with shared data agreement in place.

      Reply

    2. Hi Elizabeth, and Carl,

      Funnily enough, we have a very similar challenge – one convenor of a Q SIG has asked if we can set up Slack for her group. It seems very capable and flexible. I’ve liked it when I’ve used it. A group space (probably with a document store for favourite documents) would certainly be helpful to the group.

      But we’re just hearing that a data directive may mean that any documents must be hosted in the EU, and Slack cannot promise this (as far as I know).

      I’m not sure what the alternatives might be. Can Yammer be EU-based, and is it good enough? If it has to be EU, there’s something German called Stackfield. And what is Rocket.chat?

      Q member Ann Abbassi has been looking into the best group spaces to use too. Not sure what she has concluded yet. Speaking with her next week…

      Matthew Mezey
      (Q Community Manager)

      PS Group spaces may get added to Q’s own WordPress-based site, but not in the next few weeks…

      Reply

  5. Dear Carl/NQICAN,

    Congratulations setting up this blog. Anything that gets clinical audit and QI community talking is a fantastic idea. We ran a blog on our clinical audit tools website and after some initial interest it tailed off so we hope this is different. If you can blog every week or two that helps, but with no central funding to support our work we couldn’t sustain the initial momentum!

    You’ve asked for ideas. How about a piece explaining more about NQICAN: the transition from NAGG, who is involved, how decisions are taken, how it is funded, etc? It might also be a good idea to blog after every meeting to get the key messages out to the audit community that NQICAN represent. We wrote to Colin Bryant (NAGG chairman) in 2012 suggesting there would be real value in making sure updates from the national group are shared with members at the coalface as quickly as possible, so while appreciating minutes have to be written / checked / formalised the blog could be key to achieving this.

    Overall, we really like the feel of this. The opportunity to post messages is first-rate as it promotes accountability by way of allowing follow-up questions. Plus, the ‘little people’ in local audit who do the vital work will now have a direct channel via this blog to NQICAN and through to those running national audits and with responsibility for clinical audit at NHS England. Rest assured, we will do our best to take part in discussions, suggest ideas and promote this new blog as widely as possible.

    Reply

  6. Thank you for taking the time to write this eloquent and interesting blog. I look forward to the next installment. Maybe something relating to dealing with CQC inspections..?

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