Quality Improvement in a day: Enhancing patient care, team culture and communication
Date: Wednesday 18th June 2025
Opening times: 09:30-16:30
Venue: Online
Details
Delivering seven hours of continuing professional development (CPD), this highly interactive event features live sessions by experts Pam Mosedale, Kathrine Blackie, and Lou Northway. This event will be delivered live online, providing you the opportunity to interact with the speakers and each other, ask questions and share learning to ensure you get the most out of the day and leave feeling confident to implement QI into your daily practice.
This event will provide practical ‘how-to’ steps, allowing you to look at how you can measure and improve outcomes and care, embed new systems to improve patient safety and learn from everything that happens in your practice. Interactive sessions will demonstrate how to examine the root causes of problems and how to learn from successes, as well as when things go wrong.
A free bonus workshop will follow after the event where our expert Clinical Leads will help guide and support you to help make your projects a success.
The event is now fully virtual, so it can be accessed from anywhere. We are excited to take this event online to offer the opportunity to join this valuable learning experience to the wider veterinary community.
What does the day entail?
- Looking at how you can use QI tools to improve patient safety and team learning.
- How you can bring your team along on the QI journey, building an environment of psychological safety, where everyone feels empowered to speak up.
- How to have a structure in place to learn when errors occur, improving outcomes for our patients, and our team’s wellbeing.
- There will be opportunities to share experiences with other delegates, pick up lots of useful information and practical tips for your QI journey, and how to bring the whole team on board to apply these principles to your particular practice.
Who will benefit?
This event is open to all members of the veterinary practice team and offers expert guidance on how to implement a Quality Improvement strategy in practice. It is suitable for practice managers, vets, nurses, client care teams and clinical directors.
This event is especially beneficial for anyone taking part in the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme (PSS). The PSS update in 2022 states that all practices, including GP practices, need to show evidence of engaging with clinical audit or Significant Event Audits, both of which will be covered.
For those able to attend, you will be able to take your learning to the next level with an additional, free follow-up virtual workshop to assist with individual projects and steer them in the right direction.
What you can expect from the day
Why QI? What is quality? And what is Quality Improvement?
What is quality? And what is Quality Improvement? This session will introduce the themes of Quality Improvement (QI), how to set aims, and the QI tools available to help you achieve them.
How is everyone? The benefits of starting the day well.
We will show you the benefits of starting the day well, and how holding pre-briefs can help to plan for a smooth day. Discussing what could happen during the day ahead can help teams be prepared, aid communication and teamwork, and create a psychologically safe and supportive culture.
How are we doing? Measuring what we do.
How do we know how we are doing if we don’t measure what we are doing? We will cover the different types and themes of audits, and how you can use evidence-based veterinary practice to help make changes for continuous improvement, demonstrating the national registries we can use to benchmark our audit results against. This helps us to see just how we are doing and identify where we can improve. This session will include a workshop where you will work through an audit cycle, with practical tips and support to help you assess the results and discuss the changes you would like to make to improve outcomes.
Keeping our patients safe and supporting our teams with QI tools.
Why do we need checklists? We can’t remember everything! Checklists are tools aimed at keeping our patients safe. But they are more than just a piece of paper. They are an important part of improving communication, and teamwork for the benefit of our team wellbeing, as well as our patients. This session will show you where safety checklists fit into our everyday practice. This session includes a workshop to help you create checklists, thinking about all the non-technical skills as well as the safety-critical steps that are essential for patient safety.
Oh no! Something has gone wrong – what now?
We know errors occur in practice, and when they do, they affect the whole team as well as our patients. What is important is how we learn from them. This session includes a workshop on how to delve deeper into an event to get to the root causes, helping identify not only why it happened, but what we can learn from it and the steps we can put in place to prevent it from happening again.
Bonus session
Open only to those that attend, we will run a free virtual workshop to follow up with what you have learnt on the day, and how you have implemented QI in your practice. We will troubleshoot with you and guide you to help make your project a success.
Our expert speakers
Kathrine Blackie BVetMed CertAVP MRCVS
Kathrine qualified from the RVC in 1997 and after two years in mixed practice worked as a GP vet in companion animal practice for 20 years, 6 of those as a Clinical Director of a multi-site practice. Her main clinical interest was surgery, and she gained her CertAVP in 2016.
Kathrine joined Linnaeus in 2019 as Clinical Standards and Quality Improvement Manager, having developed a strong interest in QI and patient safety. Her current role involves all aspects of QI with the aim of continuously learning and sharing improvements to benefit both our patients and the staff that care for them.
Lou Northway VNCertECC NCert(Anaesth) RVN, RCVS Knowledge Quality Improvement Clinical Lead (RVN)
Lou qualified as a Veterinary Nurse in 2009 and has worked in various first opinion practices and a referral hospital. Her main interests are anaesthesia, analgesia, emergency and critical care nursing, and QI.
In 2019, Lou was awarded the RCVS Inspiration Award for her ongoing ability to inspire and enthuse others and was also named an RCVS Knowledge Champion in 2019 and 2020 for her clinical audit work in practice.
Lou is clinical nurse lead at Wendover Heights Veterinary Centre and Quality Improvement Clinical (RVN) at RCVS Knowledge. In practice, she is responsible for reviewing clinical standards, implementing QI practices, and training the team in her areas of interest. Through her social media channel, “Lou The Vet Nurse”, which has more than 17,000 followers, she shares CPD, hints and tips with fellow nurses, and blogs about her life as an RVN.
Pam Mosedale BVetMed FRCVS, Chair of the RCVS Knowledge Quality Improvement Advisory Board
Pam qualified from the RVC in 1979 and worked in mixed practice for the first part of her career, then was a partner in a small animal hospital for 17 years.
Pam is the Chair of the Quality Improvement Advisory Board (QIAB) at RCVS Knowledge, having had extensive involvement with the college. She was a Practice Standards Inspector from the beginning of the BSAVA practice standards scheme and continued with the RCVS, becoming Lead Assessor from April 2015 till October 2020. She welcomed the increased emphasis on Quality Improvement and clinical governance, clinical effectiveness and audit in the new scheme.
Pam is editor of the BSAVA Guide to the Use of Veterinary Medicines and an SQP assessor for AMTRA.
Pam first got involved in clinical governance when on BVHA council when she started to look into whether clinical audit could be applied to veterinary practices. She wrote the first article published in the UK on clinical audit in veterinary practices in 1999.
Pam has spoken at BSAVA Congress, BVNA congress, SPVS Congress, BEVA clinical audit workshops, CAW TP conference and on many RCVS webinars and CPD courses about clinical governance, clinical audit and Quality Improvement.
Pam is passionate about QI becoming part of the normal working day for veterinary teams and contributing to a just learning culture in practice.
Booking details
General Admission
- Single tickets: £140
Ticket package offers:
This event is open to everyone in practice, so we invite you to bring the whole team along. Choose your ticket package at checkout to automatically apply the offer.
- Buy one, get one half price: £210
- Buy 4 tickets for £400
You will need a free Eventbrite account to access your tickets after purchasing. On joining the event, Zoom will ask for some registration details, including your name and email address.
All ticket prices are inclusive of all fees.
Refund policy
If you are unable to make the event you can request a refund by emailing [email protected].
Cancellations until 4th June 2025 (2 weeks before the event)
Entitled to a 50% refund, minus Eventbrite fees.
Cancellations after 4th June 2025
Refunds are not available.
Transferring your ticket
Tickets can be transferred to another delegate. The ticket holder will be responsible for finding a replacement delegate and must arrange the change with RCVS Knowledge.