King's College London

Continuously improving and changing the way that healthcare is delivered is an important but difficult task. Culture – the values, beliefs and norms of an organisation – can support or hinder people’s ability to make changes and improvements.

Fostering a culture that champions and empowers improvement has been a long-standing goal within the UK’s National Health Service. Across the UK, hospitals strive for a culture where staff feel empowered and able to make improvements as part of their daily work (ie, ‘improvement culture’).

However, there are no ‘gold-standard’ or agreed upon approaches to measuring or assessing cultures that empower improvement. It is essential to have a way of measuring improvement culture, otherwise it is impossible to know whether an organisation has or is fostering such a culture.

In this project, King's Improvement Science specialists aim to create an evidence-based plan and guidance for how improvement culture could be measured at a large acute London hospital, King’s College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.

Working closely with the hospital’s quality improvement (QI) team, we hope this will enable the QI team to effectively measure and monitor improvement culture at the hospital.

Please visit the King's Improvement Science website for more information on this project.