EQUIP: Developing capacity and capability for perioperative improvement within UK urology training

Researchers from the Centre, the University of East Anglia and Barts Health, jointly with patients, medical education and improvement experts, trainees and the charitable Urology Foundation set up a training programme aiming to provide urology trainees across the UK with the skills and expertise they need to carry out successful and impactful quality improvement projects as part of their training rotations. Launched in 2017, the ‘Education in Quality Improvement Programme’ (EQUIP) was a research project supported by the Urology Foundation at the interface of improvement and implementation sciences and surgical education. The programme aimed to develop an evidence-based, user-informed, practical and scalable quality improvement skills training curriculum for urology trainees surgical residents in the UK. To-date, EQUIP has: (i) delivered a review of published evidence regarding how best to teach improvement skills to healthcare personnel; (ii) designed a pragmatic core improvement skills curriculum for urology trainees, deliverable within half a day of face to face teaching. The curriculum has been evaluated and found feasible and offering positive immediate educational impact; (iii) carried out a national needs assessment across urology training programmes in the UK. Further project aims EQUIP researchers were to: (i) develop a train-the-trainers approach to facilitate the scale-up of the EQUIP curriculum nationally in the UK; (ii) establish national consensus regarding the requirements of trainee improvement projects, in terms of project scope and quality assurance criteria; (iii) develop a national web portal for the sharing of trainees’ improvement projects at national level; (iv) explore the potential for EQUIP to reach out to surgical specialities outside urology.

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Professor Peter Littlejohns

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