WHAT IS EQUIP?
Education in Quality Improvement Programme
EQUIP is an Education in Quality Improvement Programme with the view to embed long-term capability and capacity for continuous improvement within urological care. The programme has been set-up to support Urology Specialty Registrars to gain the necessary skills in Quality Improvement (QI) principles and techniques, to equip them with the skills to analyse patient safety incidents and to improve quality of care.
EQUIP is funded by The Urology Foundation and is based at Centre for Implementation Science, King’s College London in collaboration with Barts Health NHS Trust and in partnership with a number of national bodies in the speciality of urology.
Why EQUIP?
Launched in 2017, EQUIP is an applied research programme at the interface of urology, improvement science and surgical education.
The vision of the programme is to develop and implement a nationally scalable, evidence-based and user-informed training and capacity development programme in quality improvement (QI) skills to embed in all urology departments in the UK.
The need for the programme has emerged organically, through patient advocacy; national policy directives to better embed QI within health services, including urology; and also the shifting specialist training for medical and surgical trainees by the GMC, from clinical audit to QI.
programme objectives
EQUIP has a dual objective: firstly, to improve the understanding and skills in quality improvement techniques across all urology trainees in the UK; and secondly, to achieve meaningful quality improvement at scale within urological care, with tangible impact on care processes and patient outcomes. Ultimately, EQUIP has the ambition to offer a scalable model for improvement skills training applicable across all surgical specialities.
The programme constitutes multiple components to bring about culture and attitude change in continuous QI in a sustainable and scalable manner. At the core of these components are:
The development and implementation of a QI skills training curriculum for urology trainees. This QI curriculum has been piloted and delivered to urology trainees’ cohorts as part of the Annual Urology Trainees Simulation Bootcamp since 2017
The development and implementation of a national educational QI web-platform to host & QI projects and to be a learning resource and QI information hub, featuring: live ongoing QI projects, ‘exemplar’ high-quality QI project, calls for collaboration with other trainees, and QI resources (e.g. templates, ‘how to’ guides).
Meet The Team
Prof Nick Sevdalis
Nick Sevdalis is the academic lead for EQUIP, a Professor of Implementation Science & Patient Safety and the Director, Centre for Implementation Science at Health Service & Population Research Department, King’s College London.
He is also the Academic Director & Clinical Academic Group Co-Lead, Quality Improvement & Implementation Science CAG, King’s Health Partners.
Nick is a psychologist, leading implementation science and improvement science research aimed at improving surgical and cancer care, which has been published in over 300 papers. Nick has developed team-based improvement programmes for surgeons and trainees and has been studying the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist for over 15 years.
Mr James Green
James Green is the clinical lead for EQUIP, a Urology Consultant at Whipps Cross Hospital where he is Director of QI and Network Urology Director for all 5 hospitals in Barts Health.
James is a committed to education, pragmatic research and quality Improvement. His interests include improving multidisciplinary teamworking and he has co-designed a number of teamworking tools, IT platforms and patient facing apps to aid patient care. He is currently working on a national improvement project with schools and on EQUIP for Urology trainees as well as implementing a urological strategy for East London in line with GIRFT and supporting the development of a new hospital at Whipps Cross. He is on the advisory Board of CRUK and is a Subject Matter Expert for the Health Service Investigation Branch (HSIB).
Dr Zarnie Khadjesari
Zarnie Khadjesari is the senior researcher for EQUIP, a Senior Lecturer in Health Promotion at the School of Health Sciences, University of East Anglia (UK).
Zarnie’s research has focussed on the development, evaluation and implementation of digital interventions for supporting people with reducing their drinking over the past 15 years. Previously, Zarnie’s senior postdoctoral fellowship at the Centre for Implementation Science awarded by King’s Improvement Science, focussed on the identification and validation of implementation outcome measures suitable for use in physical healthcare settings. Zarnie’s background is in health services research and she has experience in leading qualitative and quantitative research and provides methodological support to the EQUIP project.
Dr Elena Pallari
Elena Pallari was the research assistant for EQUIP between 2017-2018 and was based at the Centre for Implementation Science, Health Service & Population Research Department, King’s College London
Elena went on to complete her PhD studies and led the research activities and evaluation of the research outputs from the 1st phase of EQUIP that focused on the development and piloting of a QI curriculum, which was developed based a national needs assessment for QI skills training, and evidence reviews on how QI skills are best taught within healthcare and surgery.
Ms Zuhur Balayah
Zuhur Balayah was the research assistant for EQUIP between 2019-2020 while based at the Centre for Implementation Science at Health Service & Population Research Department, King’s College London.
Zuhur led the research activities and evaluation of the research outputs from the 2nd phase of EQIUP, which focuses on the programme national implementation and scale-up. Zuhur went on to undertake PhD studies that focuses on the ways in which the speed and effectiveness of the implementation of innovations in NHS organizations may be enhanced by learning from the experience of other sites.
EQUIP Steering Group
EQUIP brings together a multidisciplinary group of patients, urologists’ trainees, urologists’ consultants, educationalist and improvement scientists and The Urology Foundation, who have been working jointly since 2017 to achieve the programme’s goals. In doing so, EQUIP is at the forefront of surgical education and QI, globally.