Firstly, as another year draws to a close, we want to extend a big thank you to all of our Q members. Whether you found the time this year to get involved in a specific activity or you watched from afar, it's been a great year for the community, with a lot to reflect on. Scroll down for a look back at some of the main happenings this year.
Community Growth
During 2016 and 2017 we opened up recruitment to the Q community on a staggered basis, inviting applications from different areas throughout the UK in waves. This year we've been welcoming applications on an ongoing UK-wide basis, meaning people can apply to join Q from anywhere at any time.
Over 600 new members successfully applied to Q in 2018, taking the total community count to 2,798.
The Annual Community Event
In September over 250 Q community members descended on the NEC in Birmingham for an inspiring day of networking, learning and live voting for Q Exchange. With ten breakout sessions and six lightning talks to choose from throughout the day, there were plenty of opportunities for members to share learning and take inspiration from topics such as behavioral insights, improvement at board level, co-production and how to deliver effective feedback.
Q Exchange
This year we successfully piloted Q Exchange, a first-of-its kind funding programme for the Health Foundation. Q members were invited to post improvement project ideas online and apply for up to £30,000 for their development. The ideas were refined with the support and input of other members over a period of months, culminating in a live pitching and voting session at the annual event, which saw a total of £400,000 awarded to 15 winning projects out of 25 finalists.
Q Lab
Q Lab unites individuals and organisations to work on specific health and care challenges over the course of one year. The first lab project looked at what it would take for peer support to be made more widely available to those in need, to support their long-term health and well-being needs.
This year for its second project, the lab has partnered with mental health charity Mind. The second project will focus on supporting people living with both mental health problems and persistent back and neck pain, and how care can be designed to best meet their health and well-being needs. Anyone with lived experience or professional expertise on the topic is being invited to get involved and help shape a collective understanding of the issue.
At the end of October a series of research sessions were held at the Q Lab office and online. The sessions created space for Lab participants (people with experience and/or expertise of the topic) to add to the Lab’s very early findings, and help set the strategy for upcoming work. 25 people attended the sessions that took place on consecutive days, with each session building on the last.
Q Lab Essays
To mark the end of the first pilot project, this year the Lab launched Lab Essays – an online collection of essays capturing learning and insights. The essays provide a snapshot of the Lab’s learning on peer support from last year and try to capture the richness of working with almost 200 Lab participants – many of whom are Q members – drawing on their lived experience and practice-based learning about peer support.
Q Visits
Q site visits give members valuable opportunities to learn from different organisations from within and outside of the health and care sector. This year we went to nine different locations, learning about a variety of topics from lean manufacturing and continuous improvement, to AI and safety.
The highest rated visit of the year was to software company Mayden, where members learned all about Agile and how the organisation has been applying scrums, sprints and stories in a health care setting.
Special Interest Groups
Q's online group space provides a platform for members interested in specific areas related to improvement to reach out and connect to each other. This year it's been great to see more groups being started and more activity happening. There are currently 42 special interest groups on topics from Co-production, human factors and behavioural insights to joy at work, complexity and communities of practice.
In November, the primary care SIG invited members working in both clinical and non clinical primary care settings to come together for a day of sharing, debate and exploration at the Health Foundation.
In a particular highlight, leading global healthcare expert Don Berwick joined the session for a special address.
Evaluating Q
Evaluation continues to play a vital role in understanding, improving and shaping the community as it grows. This year we launched a new learning report, Q: the journey so far, looking back at three years' of learning from Q and responding to an interim evaluation report from RAND Europe.
We also released our annual member survey, and look forward to sharing the insights from that in the new year.
Member stories
A big thank you to all the members that posted content to the Q blog this year. The blog is an excellent way to share insights and experiences and we hope to see even more stories next year. Here we look back at some of the most read member blogs from 2018.
Twitter engagement
The @theQCommunity following has been steadily growing and in November we reached 10,000 followers. Roughly 1,500 of these are Q members, offering plenty of scope for us to connect with each other through Twitter, as well as access to thousands more followers beyond Q interested in improvement.
