Learning and Improving Across Systems - Peer Learning Programme

This programme is for you if:

• You are leading improvement work across your health and care system in the UK – this could be at place, across organisations or system level and can be outside the NHS.
• You are connecting strategy to implementation – so you may hold a role similar to (but not exclusively) programme director, improvement lead, strategy or innovation director or clinical director.
• You want to engage other improvement leads across your health and care system.
• You would like to learn about different improvement tools and approaches from leading improvement experts and your peers.
• You would like quality time and space with others to develop your ideas, skills and solutions to progress your work.
• You have an interest in being supported by peers and developing relationships that can sustain and inspire you in your improvement journey.

We are encouraging two to three participants from each health and care system to join the peer learning programme. We hope you will continue to work together back in your systems. 

We are opening this offer to all 42 integrated care systems in England and health and care systems across the rest of the UK, regardless of what stage you are at on your improvement journey. 

This programme is offered free of charge to participants, as part of the Health Foundation, NHS Confederation and Q community’s wider support to the health and care system. 

Connect with leaders across the UK navigating the opportunities and complexity of leading change through health and care systems.

It’s clear that to achieve real improvement it must happen at all levels in health and care systems. So how do leaders create the right conditions for this change?  

How do they grow and sustain new health and care systems, and build stronger population healthcare for the future? How do we learn and collaborate across organisational boundaries, geographies and systems? What are the opportunities and challenges of thinking of improvement through the lens of system working? 

Leading improvement practitioners and facilitators will be your guides

Join the Learning and Improving Across Systems Peer Learning Programme, run in partnership by the Health Foundation, NHS Confederation and Q community, to tackle questions like these. 

Leading improvement practitioners and facilitators, including from the Q community network, will be your guides, bringing in a wide range of tools, approaches, and practical success stories to meet your leadership needs and learning styles.

Throughout 2024, we will host facilitated workshops and events, peer coaching and insight gathering. We believe the best learning experiences are developed with participants, so we will continuously co-develop the programme with you and your peers, responding to your specific needs. 

Over the last year, we have listened to local system leaders to understand their challenges, hopes and needs. With their input we have co-created this offer: a flexible, time-efficient journey that creates the space for you and your peers to come together to learn and support each other.

This programme will:

• focus on helping you to take an elevated perspective on improvement across systems, while learning about different improvement frameworks, tools and approaches from leading practitioners and peers. This includes expanding and building on the new central NHS IMPACT vision and approach for improvement practice.
• help you to apply this learning to your context, giving you quality time and space with peers to bring in your own challenges and receive support in developing fresh ideas and solutions for your work.
• give you energy, ideas and tools that you can use in your own system, with connections to resources and people who can help shape and implement your work.

We will work together to tackle challenges such as how to:

• focus on long-term system goals while under pressure to fix immediate challenges
• use improvement to translate strategy into delivery at scale
• build shared ownership for improvement across the multiple organisations in a system
• make it easier to scale learning and innovation between teams, organisations and with wider partners
• break down barriers to whole-system collaboration.

Underpinning this programme is a framework, developed by Q, that identifies 18 topics that the evidence and experience of leaders suggest commonly need attention when leading large-scale change. This will provide a purposeful and flexible structure for making positive progress on the big issues that can otherwise be barriers to change. 

We expect that your learning and that of your peers will benefit the systems you represent by: 

• building collective improvement leadership and culture 
• creating the enabling conditions for system-wide improvement
• increasing effective collaboration across your system
• making best use of available resources and expertise 
• enabling more vibrant and sustainable progress towards system goals.

Over the year, we will be working alongside you to capture reflections and insights. We will distil them into actionable learning that can be shared through our combined networks. In this way we hope to influence greater momentum for change at scale.

Together, we can accelerate learning and improvement led from within health and care systems so that we can better support healthy lives in the UK.

We believe there are many different ways to learn, so we will host programmes with a variety of accessible formats and ways of engaging.

You will benefit from:

• experienced facilitators who will host participants throughout the process, helping you to navigate the range of perspectives and practical tools and approaches shared by our contributors. 
• flexible sessions will predominantly take place online – we will support accessibility needs such as closed captioning or live transcription
• interactive small group discussions
• resources for your learning journey: pre-reading, session recordings and summary of insights so that you can listen again and so that new people can join us as we go along
• practical tools and takeaways that you can adapt and use in your system.

We have designed the workshops to be primarily online to allow for greatest accessibility in participation. If you do need additional support for your access needs, such as closed captioning or live transcription, we will factor this into our session planning, and are happy to talk about this with you.

• There are four themed peer learning workshops throughout the year for participants to learn about and engage with improvement approaches.  These will be supplemented by four peer coaching sessions for participants to bring their questions and challenges to work with in small groups.
• We expect approximately 2.5 days of direct participation in workshops and coaching sessions.   There will be a further 2-3 days indirect participation time to develop learning. 

We understand that people have personal commitments and so have set the dates in advance to allow as much time as possible to get them in your diaries. To make the most of the programme we encourage you to join us for the year.    

This programme is free of charge to participants.  We ask that you commit to the offer, allow yourself the time to immerse yourself in learning, take what you learn back to your systems and contribute to growing and spreading the collective insights. 

We would like to thank you for your interest in this peer learning programme. Applications are now closed. However, we do have a waiting list. If you would like to be added or require more information please email improvement@nhsconfed.org

We have lots of resources and tools that will help you on your learning journey. Please visit our Improvement Resources Hub to find the latest information.