Insight

Decisions about improvement are sometimes made without fully understanding the realities of frontline practice or lived experience. This can lead to unsuccessful improvement work.

Q generates deep, actionable insight by working with staff, communities and leaders to understand what really shapes practice and outcomes.

Using participatory methods, we surface lived experience, frontline knowledge and system perspectives to inform improvement and strengthen decision‑making.

We help organisations and systems use these insights to tackle their most pressing challenges and embed learning into mainstream leadership and improvement practice.

Major change in health and care can struggle because staff feel disengaged or unheard. While engagement was widely recognised as important, there was no shared, practical way to define, assess or improve how staff were engaged in large‑scale change.

Partnering with Thiscovery, we worked with over 300 health and care staff to understand what good and bad engagement is like in practice. Using their experiences, we defined some clear principles of effective engagement. Through a participatory research project and individual cognitive testing we then co-designed some simple, flexible tools to help teams plan, assess and improve staff engagement.

We created a practical framework and measurement toolkit to define what good staff engagement looks like and help leaders measure and improve it in major change programmes. We focused on making engagement meaningful, consistent and measurable.