The King’s Fund has identified key enablers to embed a culture of quality improvement including:

• Developing and maintaining a new approach to leadership
• Allocating adequate time and resource
• Ensuring a continuous focus on the patient
• Being consistent in the application of QI tools and methodologies
• Maintaining employee engagement.

Cultivating these foundational elements is key to evolving from implementing discrete QI activities to complete infusion of QI into the culture. Leadership and management practices have a significant impact upon quality and a commitment to quality improvement is linked to higher quality care. Whilst everyone has a role, strong engaging leadership is important for long-term success.

To make this as simple as possible, let’s consider how you as an engaging leader can promote a culture of continuous improvement:

1. Create a visible focus on quality every day – lead by example.

2. Explain clearly what you are trying to achieve. Have a clear vision and objectives so everyone understands what you are doing and why.

3. Communicate the importance of QI to all staff. Consistently request ideas for improvement and respond quickly to those ideas.

4. Clearly outline expectations – how will everyone in the pharmacy play a role in quality improvement? Connect employees’ work and contribution to achievement of quality targets.

5. Create time and resource for quality development within your practice and share ideas.

6. Manage change and challenges to continuous quality improvement.

7. Emphasise small incremental improvements rather than perfection.

8. Encourage root cause analysis to get to the core of a problem.

9. Empower staff to make daily continuous improvements as part of their work – equip them with the necessary skills and quality improvement knowledge to carry these out effectively. 

10. Emphasise measurement in quality – celebrate and share the results achieved through continuous improvement. Display storyboards to demonstrate success.  

Quality improvement approaches require a very different leadership style. Leaders need to commit to a shift from problem-solving to being enablers of change. Here are some more ideas to support your transformation to an engaged leader:

• Display humility – a quality leader recognises that current processes and services can always be improved without being defensive
• Be passionate – people do not engage with quality initiatives where is a clear lack of enthusiasm  
• Be persistent – there will be bumps along the way. Clearly demonstrate that you are committed to quality improvement despite the challenges. Recognise that creating a culture of QI takes time and sustained effort.