The Welsh Q Exchange Projects: learnings to date

In this webinar, you’ll hear from three Q Exchange 6 teams in Wales. They’ll each share what they’ve learned so far from their projects and ask for your ideas and feedback. 

The projects are: 

• Further together 
• Value tracker
• Waiting as well as possible

Thinking and acting more as a single health and social care system is key to better outcomes for our population.  However, agreeing to that principle is easier than putting it into practice. 

The Q community knows this is difficult because a wide range of systems factors including governance, funding, professional barriers, planning frameworks and performance regimes can pull our organisations and our staff away from an ethos of shared endeavour.  Therefore, in developing our project proposal at the outset to put our multi-agency principle into practice, we chose to focus on two areas. 

Firstly, building better working relationships across a core group of multi-agency staff. Secondly, taking a data-driven approach to integrated service development.

The team’s hunch was that experimenting with the ​‘soft side’ and ​‘hard side’ of change would reveal insights and learning, as well as providing some practical steps forward. They sensed both elements would be important in improving the wellbeing of our population – but had limited resources so needed to know where best to focus as they take this work forwards following the conclusion of the project.  They also knew none of this would have an effect if they didn’t trust each other and work together.

The project has focused on:

1.  Working with Spindle CIC to explore how to better work together in partnership across the different organisations in the region. 
2. Establishing a demand and capacity model across integrated services to guide future alignment and allocation of resources.

They’re looking forward to explaining what they learned and what they’re going to do next as a result. 

The Value Tracker project worked on developing a comprehensive tool for visualising impact of improvement initiatives funded by the Value in Health team. In the health board, they work with multiple unconnected data collection systems, which makes data analysis challenging. That’s why they decided to develop a solution, using PowerBi platform, to link data from multiple sources and visualise impact from their projects in a simple, yet useful way. They’ll demonstrate how the Value Tracker works, and what their plans are for its future. 

Waiting as well as possible was a project designed to learn from people on current psychological intervention waiting lists in Local Primary Mental Health Support Services (LPMHSS) and to explore and design mechanisms for support that could be delivered by a Peer Support Worker. 

In the South Wales valleys, there are areas of deep deprivation, with high levels of community trauma and poverty which have the potential to impact on mental health and the overall outcome and efficacy of treatment. There are significant waiting lists at both primary and secondary care levels.

CTMUHB had a fledgling system to keep in touch with people whilst they wait and offer information about additional options that can be accessed whilst waiting. 

This project built on the emerging community of practice in the region, bringing together people with lived experience and partner agencies.

The team look forward to sharing what they learned about ​‘waiting well’ with you. 

Q Exchange is our funding programme that offers up to £40,000 to member-led improvement projects in a collaborative process that draws on the knowledge of the community to refine, develop and vote on proposals.