Turning something that was filling me with dread into a structured, sensible, meaningful work”.

Andy Holdstock, a registrar working in Airedale’s A&E department shared his story of how attending the Silver Quality Improvement Training course was so impactful to his work.

Quality Improvement projects are an expected part of Andy’s work. However he has never received any training before doing the bronze training online, and then applying to do the silver course. As a consequence of the training, Andy looked at the number of patients receiving a pain score which is low in his department. This is important because it enables the healthcare team to implement and monitor appropriate analgesics.

He says he has now been able to take a structured approach to developing a strategy to improve the use of pain scores in A&E, rather than the temptation to make it a mandatory part of care, he has looked to understand why staff don’t complete the pain score and then engaged the team in ways of ‘making the right thing the easy thing to do’. He is using his silver QI training to improve the proportion of patients in A&E who are given a pain score, and treated with analgesics accordingly.

Andy attended the Improvement Academy Silver Quality Improvement training day, funded through the Yorkshire and Humber AHSN on 19th November 2018.