“Attending the Understanding and Reducing Variation in Healthcare and SPC in Healthcare courses has given me the skills to understand and interpret charts.”

Gemma Williams is a Clinical Leadership Fellow at York Teaching Hospital. Gemma’s current project is around improving management of patients who present with sepsis in a hospital setting. 

Gemma attended the Understanding and Reducing Variation in Healthcare and Statistical Process Control charts in Healthcare courses and now feels confident in showing others what she has learnt. Gemma feels she now has the ability to present data in meetings and explain graphs to others. She is using the knowledge she gained on the courses directly in her work around sepsis and blood culture contamination. The blood culture contamination numbers are very small every month so understanding this data has been really helpful to understand the problem.

Gemma now takes more notice of the fluctuation in data during her monthly audits for CQUIN. By understanding this fluctuation displayed in the SPC charts Gemma and her team are able to show that the interventions that they have been undertaking have had an impact on improving the number of patients with sepsis receiving antibiotics in a timely fashion. Gemma has now been able to demonstrate that the team are achieving their objectives to reduce sepsis rates and the team able to focus their efforts on understanding special cause variation rather than common cause.

Gemma attended the Improvement Academy Understanding and Reducing Variation in Healthcare on 17th October 2017 and SPC in Healthcare on 24th October 2018. Both courses were funded through the Yorkshire and Humber AHSN.