Sheffield Health and Social Care (SHSC) have secured funding for two quality improvement projects to improve mental health care in Sheffield.

The first of these aims to improve how our Psychiatric Decisions Unit (PDU) is used, both by our own services but also our partners to help make sure people needing mental health care are seen by the right person, in the right place, at the right time. Being only one of six designated PDUs across the country, we are proud to be working on improvements in this service and using the Q Exchange platform to be able to share our learning nationally.

The second project will increase accessibility to QI by setting up a QI Academy (Qi4All) that will support our partners from Voluntary, Community and Social Enterprises and other healthcare organisations to work together to improve mental health across Sheffield. The teams involved in the academy will also include individuals with lived experience and protected characteristics, ensuring a diverse and equitable group of participants receive this training.

The funding has been awarded through Q Exchange after a rigorous national selection process that saw 127 bids submitted. Q Exchange is one of the Q Community’s funding programmes and is jointly funded by the Health Foundation and NHS England. The Q Community is an online community made up of thousands of people across the UK and Ireland, collaborating to improve the safety and quality of health and care. It’s free to join and open to anyone with an interest in quality improvement.

Speaking about our project to improve how our PDU is used, Dr Holly Smith, ST6 Registrar at SHSC, said:

“I am delighted that the hard work by Jenny Marshall and myself has paid off and we have been awarded funding to start Improving the Psychiatric Decisions Unit. I am excited to work with unit consultant Dr Raihan Talukdar and the rest of the PDU team as well as working collaboratively with organisations such as Flourish. In particular I am looking forward to working directly with service users and ensuring their voices are heard, with improvements and changes made with their involvement.”

And speaking about the winning bids, Parya Rostami, Head of Continuous Improvement at SHSC, said: 

“We are extremely proud to have been successful in securing support for two QI ideas in this year’s QExchange, especially as 127 ideas were submitted nationally. Through the QExchange, not only will we receive funding to support the improvement projects, but also support from national experts to work together to have a bigger impact and change things that will make a difference for our people, including service users and staff. I personally hope this will inspire other colleagues to come forward with more improvement ideas for future opportunities.”

Our Quality Improvement team will now start to work on each of the projects, working closely in partnership with clinical teams, partner organisations and service users to develop and launch the two projects.

Watch out for more updates soon.