Prof Niro Siriwardena gave an invited keynote presentation on 24 November at THIS Space 2021, the annual flagship event of The Healthcare Improvement Studies Institute at Cambridge University led by Prof Mary Dixon-Woods, on the topic of, ‘Improving the evidence for improving cross-sector working’. The event seeks to provide a focus for knowledge sharing in healthcare improvement, stimulate innovation and fresh thinking, connect colleagues from across different disciplines, and help support professional growth.
Working across multiple sectors is important to quality and safety in the care of patients, but is hard to do well. The session looked at the evidence base for cross-sector working, drawing on examples from pre-hospital emergency care, given by Niro Siriwardena and care homes, given by Claire Goodman, Professor of Health Care Research at the University of Hertfordshire.
The presentation defined cross-sectoral working, discussed its importance for all quality improvement because of the need to involve patient and service user contributors and experts, and different organisations particularly where improvement efforts cross or might affect intra- or inter organisational boundaries, processes or outcomes, to account for complexity and address fragmentation, and to ensure connectedness and relevance, ownership and credibility of the problem and its solutions. Examples from the Prehospital Outcomes fo Evidence Based Evaluation to develop ambulance outcome measures, work improving prehospital pain management and the recently published ‘Ambulance ‘Hypos’ can strike twice’ (Ambu-HS2) study were provided as examples of cross sector working. Vivienne Parry OBE facilitated questions from the audience at the end. To hear the presentation click here.