Context We are describing the development of a plan for engaging our medical workforce in the clinical safety and quality assurance learning available through our organisation Healthcare Improvement Scotland (HIS) as we support health and social care.

The purpose of Healthcare Improvement Scotland is to enable the people of Scotland to experience the best quality of health and social care

Our doctors work in HIS as clinical leads, national committee chairs and reviewers and are often on secondment from Scottish territorial health boards

The medical directorate team in HIS aims to provide a bespoke, unique medical leadership experience for the doctors working across the organisation (assurance, evidence, improvement) with a key focus on safety and quality of care.

Issue/Challenge The NHS in Scotland is under pressure like never before with reduced space for improvement for both quality and safety.

As a core oversight organisation in NHS Scotland with a portfolio of evidence, improvement and assurance work, we have a unique opportunity to develop our clinicians undertaking specific medical roles (often secondment and chairing roles) with a focus on the national safety and quality of care agenda.

Assessment of issue and analysis of its causes

System challenges in NHS Scotland have in recent times been acutely exacerbated by the impact of the pandemic with staffing shortages and a depleted and exhausted workforce at the same time as an escalation in clinical needs and waiting times.

As a result there are leadership challenges in maintaining oversight of key quality and care considerations and ensuring effective communication of risks. It has never been more important to invest in our leaders to ensure a focus on quality and safety is paramount.

Impact The benefits to our clinical Leadership cohort is that we can offer a bespoke clinical leadership experience including learning around our core pillars of work: evidence, improvement and assurance.

We anticipate that this will enable our doctors to both flourish in their time with us at HIS working within the national healthcare context and return to their health boards with a toolkit for improving safety and quality in healthcare

Intervention The HIS advanced medical leadership experience offers a national platform for networking and engagement for our medical colleagues through our medical fora.

We have put together an internal leadership offering including leadership conversations, peer support, mentoring, shadowing of our HIS leaders in our programmes of work and curation of online learning with a key focus on our learning around safety, clinical governance and assurance work.

Involvement of stakeholders, such as patients, carers or family members:

This project is currently limited to developing a bespoke national leadership experience with engagement and feedback from our medical cohort

Key Messages Healthcare Improvement Scotland has a unique opportunity to make a real impact on the national quality and safety agenda in NHS Scotland alongside our existing improvement, evidence and quality assurance work. This is through investing in our doctors who undertake HIS national clinical roles by offering a unique advanced medical leadership experience with a national focus on quality and safety. The aim is that this learning is shared on return to their substantive roles in the Scottish territorial health boards.

Lessons learnt This work is in the early stages of implementation. Barriers to progression include a pressure on time to develop the offering and to ensure the opportunity to engage,

Early learning is that the passion of of the HIS medical directorate project group to succeed with this project has given the work a real priority statue and generated an enthusiasm for engagement from our medical cohort

Measurement of improvement Our approach to measuring improvement will be to look at feedback, gauge satisfaction and discuss the quality of the learning experience as doctors move through their time with us

Strategy for improvement The offering will start in September 22 and will run as a regular forum hosted by the medical directorate.

This will include leadership masterclass sessions with medical leaders committed to quality and safety in healthcare and involvement in strategy discussions. There will be open sessions around current challenges alongside national updates.

The project team have gauged initial interest and will be arranging bespoke shadowing offerings tailored to their individual requirements. Peer support will be arranged at a time that suits with a matched colleague.

The work is in the early stages of development and will grow organically with real time feedback