Staff celebrate projects to make improvements to provide better care for children, young people and women

Staff from across our hospitals and community sites came together virtually to celebrate projects designed to improve processes and services for the benefit of women and families at the 7^th annual Evelina London Quality Improvement (QI) Conference.

The conference is an opportunity for teams to share learning and celebrate achievements. This year, 135 posters reflecting projects involving over 500 people were submitted from across Evelina London’s children’s and women’s services. This was the first Evelina London QI conference that colleagues working in children’s cardio-respiratory and intensive care services at our Royal Brompton Hospital site had the opportunity to take part in, following last year’s Trust merger.

Highlights from the winning posters included a home testing service set up for children and young people with cystic fibrosis, and an app to help families with aftercare following their child’s operation.

More than 200 people attended the online conference – the highest number in several years. We were also delighted to welcome James Mountford, Director of National Improvement Strategy at NHS England, as our special guest presenter who spoke about the importance of kindness.

James O’Brien, Director of Operations and Improvement, said: “I’m exceptionally proud of all my colleagues and the huge effort, achievement, and learning that the Evelina London Quality Improvement Conference represents. It’s been incredible to see the number of people involved, and the variety and ingenuity of projects. It’s been a difficult time over the past two years, and this conference goes to show how passionate our teams are as they have continued to innovate services and processes despite the pressures of the pandemic.”

“They have risen to the challenge to go above and beyond in continuing to deliver the best care for children, young people and families accessing our wide range of hospital services at Evelina London Children’s Hospital and Royal Brompton Hospital, our community-based children’s and women’s services in Lambeth and Southwark, and people using our maternity and gynaecology services based at both Guy’s and St Thomas’.”

The winning projects were:

• Reducing the time to prescribe medicine for Paediatric Intensive Care Unit stepdowns on the General Paediatric ward

A project by the general paediatrics team looking at how to speed up the process for children moving from intensive care to a general ward.

• Setting up home testing in paediatrics services

The cystic fibrosis team developed a home testing kit so they could continue to provide regular tests for routine cystic fibrosis treatment. This saved children and young people from having to come into hospital for the tests while they were shielding.

• Rose@Home: Using co-design to deliver home IV antibiotics on a virtual ward

The Rose ward team at Royal Brompton Hospital set up a virtual ward for their cystic fibrosis patients who need antibiotics intravenously (when a treatment is given directly into a vein in the arm). This involved children and young people having daily virtual appointments with nurses, doctors and physiotherapists, just as they would have in hospital.

• Paediatric cardiac photo of the surgical wound at discharge and remote post-discharge surveillance transformation project

The cardiac surveillance team at Evelina London Children’s Hospital designed an app that allows children and their families to take images of surgical scars after a heart operation and digitally send them to their clinical team for review. This saves them from having to travel into hospital for the clinical team to check the scar.