Abstract: In UK healthcare there has been continuous development in data collection to monitor the quality and safety of care, in the form of both local and national programmes for quality improvement, clinical audit, incident reporting, mortality surveillance and digital technology, amongst others. In the past, feedback from large-scale monitoring programmes has been limited. Recently, the promotion of quality improvement methods has given rise to new models for effective use of data and advances across a range of disciplines afford us opportunities to better understand how to make feedback more useful and actionable for clinicians, teams and organisations. Such approaches promise to translate data into interventions that support professional behaviour change, local quality improvement and robust implementation. In this research seminar, the challenges and opportunities for enhanced feedback and local use of data will be outlined, drawing upon experience across a range of research projects that have applied human and organisational perspectives to topics in quality improvement and patient safety. Specific applications include quality in anaesthesia, national mortality alerting and patient safety incident reporting and learning systems. The relative merits of a model for continuous monitoring and feedback, based upon industrial quality improvement practices, will be discussed.
Biography: Jonathan Benn is Associate Professor in Healthcare Quality and Safety at the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds. With a background in Psychology and Human Factors, he has 13 years’ experience as a health services researcher using applied theory and methods from the social sciences to address a range of research questions at clinical and policy level. His previous post was a Lectureship in Quality Improvement at Imperial College London and as Director of the MSc course there in Quality and Safety. His work has been supported by the Health Foundation, NIHR CLAHRC and NIHR Health Services and Delivery Research programmes. He is currently an Associate Editor for the Joint Commission Journal on Quality and Patient Safety, which publishes international improvement research and practical case studies to share learning across contexts.