New online course!

Burns services in low resource settings often struggle to implement change and standards can remain low from year to year. However, a new online course developed by the Centre for Global Burn Injury Policy and Research (CGBIPR) and Interburns, funded by the NIHR, hopes to change that.

Based on a quality improvement project with nurses from Malawi and Ethiopia in 2019, the Improvement and Implementation Science Course sets out in clear and interactive steps, the knowledge that healthcare staff need to take action and bring about real change. It is relevant to all staff working in burns – nurses, dieticians, therapists and clinicians – and can be adapted to any healthcare setting.

As a therapist from Ghana says: ‘It helps you to be yourself within your own environment, to make practical change possible considering the limited resources that stare into the faces of the low to middle income health worker’.

The course explains what Implementation and Improvement Science is, and its link with quality improvement. It clarifies ‘quality’ in healthcare and covers the essentials of health economics.  Two sections: Knowledge, which covers the main tools and concepts and helps participants understand how to make improvements in spite of few resources; and Action which leads participants through a worked example, are followed by a project template and the related Practical Guide to Quality Improvement in Burn Care, which is full of examples, the highs and the lows, from real projects.

 The course is freely available to access now at https://learn.interburns.org/lms/