“Attending the course inspired me to think about different ways of approaching change than the traditional without emphasis on staff behaviours and culture.”

Liz Tomlin, a nurse by background, has just joined the Quality Improvement team at Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, having previously worked in research around quality improvement and patient involvement.

Liz is working on a number of Quality Improvement projects around safer procedure collaborative, patient experience collaborative and the maternity collaborative.

Liz attended the ABC training in November 2018 which provided guidance on using the ‘Theoretical Domains Framework’ (TDF) to come up with evidence-based plans for overcoming behavioural and cultural barriers to change. Liz intends to use this first within the “safer procedure collaborative”. The aim of the Safer Procedure Collaborative is to improve patient safety by ensuring the use of standardised checklists. The TDF framework will add a theory of implementation to this work. The TDF framework helps assess issues/behaviours and cultures that could be forming barriers, so that changes made can be given a rationale, and then assessed.

Liz has very positive general feedback about the Improvement Academy resources and support offered, including bronze online training. She would like to make the case for Bradford Teaching Hospitals to integrate this into all employees’ training. She was also very comforted by the existence of the Improvement Academy as she knows she has somewhere to go for support as she tries to support the frontline.

Liz attended the Improvement Academy Achieving Behaviour Change workshop, funded through the Yorkshire and Humber AHSN on 9th November 2018.