The lessons learned from two quality improvement forums

The British Medical Association (BMA) and the King's Fund have recommended that ‘shop-floor doctors’ in all hospitals should feedback the everyday management challenges they face to the senior management via doctor-management forums known as quality improvement forums (QIFs). This collaborative partnership between junior doctors and management should help to tackle these challenges and improve the service. We discuss how we set up QIFs in two hospitals, the difficulties faced and the lessons learned. The QIFs were held every two months. At each forum, speakers had five minutes to present a management problem, then five minutes to propose a possible solution. Forum attendees were asked that all discussions be helpful and productive. Many management changes were made including: changing investigation requests from paper to digital; improving the on-call bleep system, improving the on-call medical handover; and improvements to the hospitals' induction process.