Quality planning

Leadership should periodically plan and prioritise the design and redesign of processes, services and products, allocating resources and identifying capacity and capability to meet population needs.

Organisations, directorates and teams will already have planning cycles in place. When developing your Quality Management System (QMS), the key differences in planning will most likely include:

• A consistent focus on customer need, staff wellbeing and culture informed by internal and external feedback. Customer need ultimately defines quality for your organisation.
• A defined purpose aligned to need that shapes daily work, steers improvement and prioritises managing for quality.
• A rigorous process approach underpinned by clear documentation.

Supporting resources

• Quality planning for impactful improvement: a mixed methods review: This research article published in BMJ Open Quality summarises the key literature and enablers to support quality planning.
• Effective quality planning: This Healthcare Executive publication describes the elements of quality planning. While this focuses on a US context, it provides some useful insight for UK organisations.
• What is a Quality Plan?: The American Society for Quality’s resource describes the parts of a quality plan and some tools to support documentation and deployment. This resource is not health care specific.
• A guide to developing and assessing a quality plan: A guide for health care organisations in developing effective quality plans.
• Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s strategic gap analysis.
• The improvement journey: This Health Foundation report outlines why organisation-wide improvement in health care matters, and how to get started.
• Monitor’s Strategic Workforce Planning Tool.
• Process Approach in QMS: How to Build an Efficient, Process-Driven Quality Management System - eLeaP Quality.
• Healthcare Improvement Scotland’s Process Rigour.
• Q’s guide to Leading successful partnerships.
• Improvement Cymru Academy Toolkit Guide: Family of measures and operational definitions.