Quality Improvement in a day: Enhancing patient care, team culture and communication

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

Open only to those that attend, we will run a free virtual workshop in January 2025 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.

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.

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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.

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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 Quality Improvement Clinical Lead and 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. 

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Victoria graduated from Cambridge University in 2006 and worked as an ambulatory equine vet for several years before becoming a resident in Equine Internal Medicine in March 2009.  She became a European and RCVS recognised specialist in Equine Internal Medicine in 2013 and was part of the medicine referral team at Liphook Equine Hospital for more than a decade.  

More recently, she works as a specialist consultant and is an affiliate lecturer at the University of Cambridge School of Veterinary Medicine.  Her specific areas of interest include endocrinopathies, antimicrobial stewardship, ophthalmology, diagnostic imaging, and clinical pathology.  She is working towards an MSc in Evidence Based Healthcare at the University of Oxford.  Victoria also works for the FEI (eventing and endurance) and is a Level 1 OV and PTV.  Victoria is passionate about the dissemination of evidence into practice, and promoting innovation and Quality Improvement in practice, and is employed part-time as a consultant by Credivet.

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