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

Pam Mosedale

In this session, Pam Mosedale will introduce the themes of Quality Improvement (QI), how to set aims, and the QI tools available to help you achieve them.

Helen Silver-MacMahon

Helen 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. 

Lou Northway and Pam Mosedale

How do we know how we are doing if we don’t measure what we are doing? 

Pam and Lou 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.  

Helen Silver-MacMahon and Lou Northway

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. 

This session has been kindly sponsored by Dechra

Helen Silver-Mac-Mahon and Lou Northway

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 to follow up with what you have learnt today, and how you have implemented QI in your practice. We will troubleshoot with you and guide you to help make your project a success. Details of this workshop will be given to you in person.

Helen qualified as an RVN in 2000 and has worked in both first opinion and referral hospitals. Since qualifying, she has gained certificates in ECC and Small Animal Nutrition and the Advanced Diploma in Veterinary Nursing (surgical).

In 2021, Helen completed a MSc in Patient Safety and Clinical Human Factors at the University of Edinburgh and is currently undertaking a PhD at the University of Lincoln exploring the non-technical skills that veterinary nurses require when monitoring and maintaining anaesthesia. She is also collaborating with the University of Aberdeen to research Incivility in veterinary practice and working towards chartered ergonomist status.

Helen is an RCVS Knowledge Champion for her role in the sustained training and use of a surgical safety checklist within the small animal theatre at the former Animal Health Trust.

Helen is passionate about developing the veterinary profession's understanding of Human Factors as a powerful aid in improving patient safety, enhancing performance, and supporting the wellbeing of the veterinary team. She enjoys designing bespoke coaching, training and speaking on topics that advance the quality of care. She has written articles and co-authored several book chapters on both clinical and non-clinical aspects of practice.

Helen is Quality Improvement Clinical Lead within the RCVS Knowledge team, offering bespoke training to practices across the UK. If you would like to find out more about how to work with Helen, please email [email protected]

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 Nurse Lead 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 is QI Clinical lead for RCVS Knowledge and Chair of the RCVS Knowledge Quality Improvement Advisory Board. She was Lead Assessor for the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme until very recently. Pam has worked in first opinion practice for most of her career. She is also an SQP assessor for AMTRA and edits the BSAVA Guide to the Use of Veterinary Medicines and organises the BSAVA Dispensing Course.

Pam has been involved in establishing Quality Improvement resources for the veterinary practice team. She is passionate about QI becoming part of the normal working day for veterinary teams and contributing to a just learning culture in practice.