23 January 2023
We are absolutely delighted to be able to announce that the Getting It Right First Time (GIRFT) team from NHS England, is providing additional support to the BSR-led JIA learning collaborative programme in 2023/24.
GIRFT is a national programme designed to improve the treatment and care of patients through in-depth review of services, benchmarking, and presenting a data-driven evidence base to support change.
The programme undertakes clinically-led reviews of specialties, combining wide-ranging data analysis with the input and professional knowledge of senior clinicians to examine how things are currently being done and how they could be improved.
GIRFT is part of an aligned set of programmes within NHS England. The programme has the backing of the Royal Colleges and professional associations, including BSR.
The GIRFT website can be found here where you can find out more about the work they are helping to do, in partnership with adult rheumatology teams. Watch this short video to hear about the report they have produced and its recommendations.
As you know, using our collaborative methodology, the JIA learning collaborative is designed to support paediatric rheumatology teams across the UK to improve the care and outcomes of patients with Juvenile Idiopathic Arthritis. We hope the long-term benefit of collaborative will be to enhance the capacity and capability of paediatric rheumatology teams to routinely collect and use data for improvement, leaving a legacy within teams that can be applied to future quality improvement.
GIRFT’s official support of JIA-Learn recognises that the work we are doing together is highly innovative, especially our attempts through PDSA cycles to create a collaborative data set, something that has never been achieved in JIA care before.
Their support means that we will be able to go back to the six other paediatric teams in England that originally applied to take part in the collaborative and now offer them a place on the programme, if they still have capacity to join us.
Our plan is to hold an additional learning event in the Spring of 2023 for this new group of teams, and then bring all 12 teams together for learning events two and three, which we will now hold in July and November 2023. Our hope is that this increases the spread of the work we are doing together and the ability of JIA-Learn to continue its “all learn, all teach” methodology.
We have written to the six teams with the offer of joining us all on this incredibly exciting journey and will let you know who they are as soon as we can.
If you have any questions about this, then please do get in touch at qi@rheumatology.org.uk.