New Blog Post: Dr Julian Abel using the Life QI system

Dr Julian Abel from Cornwall Hospice Care uses the Life QI system to help run his improvement projects and mentor team members. He explains how he uses the system and the benefits he derives.
The SW AHSN was involved in the initial design of the system in collaboration with Seedata and the system draws upon the Model for Improvement as promulgated by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement click here for more details.
“I use the Life QI system for running projects and find that it is absolutely fantastic. One of the great things that you can do with Life QI is run projects geographically, as it means that you can work with other people on projects virtually without having to see them face to face. I use Life QI to support the calls that I arrange every few weeks with mentees. I am based in Cornwall and am overseeing a project in the Mendips looking at a complex model of care that has been effective in reducing emergency admissions to hospitals by 30%. The project has been proved in Frome and we are rolling it out across the Somerset area. Each GP practice has a lead GP that runs the project and we have 12 GP practices on this, so I use Life QI to support my improvement methodology mentoring sessions.
The second massive benefit of using Life QI is that it people understand the individual components of improvement projects. If team members are having to sort out own data, Driver Diagrams or PDSA cycles, for example, can appear quite complex. With Life QI, everything is laid out so brilliantly you can take people through these, which is fantastic. This includes Run Charts which are a fundamental principle, as you need to be able to show change in improvement (they automatically highlight when a trend has been identified) and people can find these really tricky. Life QI system makes them really clear.
In Cornwall, we are starting to run a hospice care project and I will be getting everyone familiar with improvement methodology using Life QI, rather than audit and compliance. There is no question that this particular piece of software makes an enormous difference to quality projects: it’s absolutely amazing! The biggest single difference the NHS could see would be if everyone was using this methodology.”