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Beyond the Ward: Improving the quality of patient care

29 September 2020

On average, 400 undergraduate medical students undertake a Quality Improvement Project each year at King’s, leading to conference presentations and possible publications.

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All clinicians need to have knowledge and expertise to undertake quality improvement. At King’s, all fourth-year undergraduate medical students are required to undertake a specific ‘must pass’ module focused on quality improvement and evidence-based practice to progress through their studies.

The module takes place as students’ first clinical placement of the academic year, lasting for six months, up to four hours per week. Students work in peer group teams of up to six, allocated to a senior clinician, whose responsibility is to guide the students through a project which aims to improve the quality of a specific primary and secondary care services across London and the South East of England.

The module is not just about delivering the improvement but learning how to do it and the enablers and challenges in an authentic situation. Students learn valuable team working skills, both with their peers and clinical teams.– Cindy Sethi, Director for Quality Improvement and Module Lead

The annual Quality Improvement Conference aims to celebrate students’ hard work throughout the course in leading, implementing and embedding quality improvement initiatives which benefit patients, carers, and staff. Individual improvement projects are submitted via a short abstract to a marking panel who rank each submission, choosing the strongest 20 to give an oral presentation at the conference, whilst the rest offered a poster presentation.

Due to the COVID-19 outbreak, the conference was held virtually this year. Almost 60 abstracts were submitted and over 150 people attended the event.

Each prize-winning group for the presentations receives £1,000 and poster prize winners are awarded £500 for their work, which is used to assist in publication in open access journals, such as BMJ Open Quality. Many groups are also offered the opportunity to present their projects at national and international conferences.

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Overall, it was an extremely successful conference and it is amazing to see students getting involved with clinical teams to affect meaningful change to patient care. They are inspirational!– Cindy Sethi, Director for Quality Improvement and Module Lead

Yanjinkham Chuluunbaatar gave an oral presentation on behalf of his team which included students Charlotte Harvey, Roxanne Suttakom, Omar Joli and Masud Awil, whose project, aiming to enhance the recovery pathway for women undergoing elective caesarean section at St Thomas’ Hospital, received the joint first prize.

It was a fantastic experience presenting at the conference and whilst it was different without an audience, this meant that I was less nervous presenting as I wasn’t aware of the number of people watching. With the prize money, we aim to publish this project in the BMJ, and we have also submitted a poster abstract for a ‘Leaders in Healthcare’ conference.– Yanjinkham Chuluunbaatar, fourth-year undergraduate medical student

Rachael Xi Lin Lee, Lilly MacLean and Pedra Rabiee were one of the poster prize winning groups, selected for undertaking the most sustainable project. Their project aimed to improve the uptake of the readiness assessment questionnaire for adolescents with sickle cell disease, to allow for an effective transition from paediatric to adult care.

We ensured that the reformatted questionnaire, a new explanatory cover sheet and the transition pathway poster that we introduced were sustainably implemented and easily accessible to all staff, enabling lasting impact from the project. Towards the end of our project, we also began a collaboration with IMPARTs, a King’s Health Partners initiative, to work on providing fully funded iPads to administer the questionnaire.– Lilly MacLean, fourth-year undergraduate medical student

It is hoped that many projects undertaken at King’s will have a lasting impact on the medical field and will encourage students to continually engage in quality improvement efforts throughout their medical careers.

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