Promoting Care Quality and Improving Safety

Summative portfolio submission general guidance
Please only use this template for the submission of part 1 of your summative assessment (Part 2 is your poster submission which you submit separately).
There are eight sections that you must complete for the portfolio submission, and a ninth section for the option of including one or more appendices.
The overall word count is 2,000 words for sections 1 to 7 inclusive (NB: 10% + or – word count allowance)
The template headings and guidance (you should remove the guidance), reference list and any appendices you add, are not included in the word count.

It is probably best to complete sections 1, 4, 5, 6 and 7 first. These are the sections that set out your QI proposal. Getting that clear in your mind then helps you know what you are arguing for in sections 2 and 3 and might help with knowing what literature to look for.
You could then write sections 2 and 3 as one continuous piece of writing then divide them into those sections.
1) Project title (choose a title that clearly defines the QI idea)
Student examples in Week 3; midwifery poster example.

2) Background (outline of the chosen topic area and benefits of intervening to make improvements)

Example: say you wanted to improve oral hygiene, that is your topic. In this section you need to talk about why oral hygiene is important to attend to effectively, and what sort of problems arise when oral hygiene is not attended to effectively. You will need to refer to policies and some literature.

3) Problem & evidence (critical analysis of problems associated with the chosen topic with supporting literature, i.e., policy drivers, guidelines, research evidence, mention of 3 to 5 enablers and barriers)

The overall purpose of this section is to persuade the reader that your QI proposal is worth carrying out, based on your critical analysis of literature and your experiences/ observations of clinical practice. You need to offer a balanced argument, and as part of this section you need to demonstrate that you have thought about ‘enabler’s’ and ‘barriers’. An enabler is anything which could potentially support your QI proposal being successful, and a barrier is anything that could potentially impede your QI proposal being a success. Enablers and barriers might be identified from the literature (from policies or theory papers or opinion papers or research evidence) and/ or from your own understanding of clinical practice. You can also draw on PDSA cycle and/ or SusQI principles in this section. The Week 2 Handbook outlines the PDSA cycle and the Week 4 Handbook has information on SuSQI.
The week 4 Handbook on literature shows you the number of different types of supporting literature you can draw on – you do not need masses of scientific research evidence

4) Project aim(s) (overall aim/s, SMART goals and reference to, or inclusion of a PDSA or other QI framework)

Week 6 & 7 Module content/ Handbooks; student examples in Week 3; midwifery poster example.
What you need to include here:
Overall aim statement
SMART goals:
• Specific – What is the one thing that you’re trying to achieve? (The ‘what’)
• Measurable – How will you know you’ve reached your goal? (The ‘how much’)
• Achievable – Is this actually possible? Could making it smaller make it more possible?
• Relevant – Why is this important?
• Time-bound – When will this be accomplished by? (The ‘when’)

5) Intervention (one sentence description of the QI intervention)
Student examples in Week 3; midwifery poster example.

6) Plan (who will do what, where and when… give this section more structure)
You can use the guidance as headings:
Who:
What:
Where:
When:

7) Measurement of improvement (what method will you use to assess the impact of your QI idea most accurately? E.g staff focus group, patient questionnaire. )

You only need one measurement of improvement. You don’t need to justify your choice, but the measurement method needs to logically fit with your QI proposal.

8) References (full list here in APA 7th format)

9) Appendix / appendices for supporting information, if required (This section is optional).