Welcome to the Quality Improvement Hub!
A home for quality improvement in Acute Medicine.
The SAM Quality Improvement Hub brings together SAMBA, SAM-PLER, SAM SitRep, QI training and resources, and a growing national repository of improvement projects from across the Society, and is managed by the QI Committee.
Whether you're a resident doctor, consultant or member of the multidisciplinary team, our aim is to help you learn about, develop and share quality improvement solutions in Acute Medicine — and we'd love you to help shape what's next.
About the QI Committee
Quality improvement in Acute Medicine belongs to everyone. The QI Committee brings together representatives from SAM Council, the SAMBA team, resident doctors, new and experienced consultants, and multidisciplinary colleagues from across the UK.
We believe the best improvement ideas come from the front line — from the people who see, every day, where care could be safer, faster or kinder. Whether you're running your first QI project or leading service transformation, everyone has something valuable to contribute.
As the NHS Long Term Plan makes clear, there is a great opportunity for Acute Medicine to play an integral role in building the system and culture for improvement in the NHS. We meet regularly to shape the Society's quality improvement programme, oversee national audit and benchmarking, develop QI training and practical resources, and support improvement work that benefits the whole Acute Medicine community.
Meet the QI Lead
Dr Vinay Reddy-Kolanu
Vinay is a Consultant in Acute Medicine in the West Midlands, where he is the regional Training Programme Director (TPD) for Acute Internal Medicine and a member of the AIM Specialty Advisory Committee (SAC). He joined SAM in 2009 and has been a regular at SAM conferences ever since.
For over a decade, until stepping down in 2024, Vinay was clinical lead of one of the busiest AMUs in the UK. He established its Same Day Emergency Care (SDEC) service in 2012 and oversaw the significant growth of the team — expanding the consultant body from 3 to 15, AIM registrars from 2 to 4, and IMT-level doctors from 6 to 30, including 16 new IMT3 posts. He was also key in establishing a large, innovative and substantively funded AMU pharmacy team.
As TPD, Vinay has been dedicated to maintaining the excellent reputation of the West Midlands AIM programme, which has consistently recruited to 100%. Through the SAC, he is committed to ensuring the equitable, high-quality delivery of the AIM curriculum, and over the past year has introduced several significant changes that have enhanced both the reputation of the training and how it is delivered.
Vinay's approach to improvement pairs innovative QI strategies with a carefully considered outcome: a deep, compassionate understanding of the underlying issues, and a realistic, patient and resilient approach to solving them. Recent successes include substantively introducing same-day echocardiography and Holter monitoring, procuring a static retinal camera for SDEC, and establishing multiple hot clinic pathways through SDEC.
He has supported resident doctors, pharmacists, nurses, ACPs and consultants to consolidate their ideas and data, and to analyse and present their findings as posters and presentations at many SAM conferences. Since 2017 he has helped publish several papers in peer-reviewed journals — from basic science to complex analyses of SDEC admissions — including in the Society's own journal, Acute Medicine.
Vinay is excited to be leading the Society's quality improvement work — and is clear about what he wants it to deliver:
“We plan to provide much more support to help every member of the multidisciplinary team learn about, develop and share quality improvement solutions in Acute Medicine.
Meaningful change is difficult to achieve — and this is rarely recognised in the NHS. Too much emphasis is placed on quick wins delivered over short timeframes, which inevitably leads to unsustainable solutions that fade rapidly. To counter this, we are significantly increasing the support we provide — and we'd love you to be part of it.”
What We Do
The committee oversees and develops SAM's quality improvement work, with the aim of helping acute medical teams understand their services, improve them, and share what works.
Our work includes:
- Delivering SAMBA — the Society for Acute Medicine Benchmarking Audit — our annual national audit of acute medical care, and publishing the national report.
- Developing and reviewing the Clinical Quality Indicators for Acute Medicine, so units can benchmark against meaningful, evidence-based standards.
- Leading SAM-PLER, bringing patient-reported experience into how we measure and improve acute medical care.
- Running SAM SitRep — rapid national Situation Reports that capture the pressures facing acute medicine services, including measures specific to our specialty (such as SDEC) that national NHS reporting often misses.
- Developing QI training for the specialty — including our two training programmes, Acute Medics as Improvers and Acute Medics Leading Improvement — and supporting QI certification.
- Identifying national priorities for improvement in Acute Medicine, including Same Day Emergency Care and patient flow.
- Curating practical QI guides, toolkits and case studies for the whole multidisciplinary team.
- Supporting members to design, deliver, share and publish their own QI projects — and showcasing them at SAM conferences.
- Working with other SAM committees and external organisations to embed quality improvement across Acute Medicine.
QI Training
The Society recognises the importance of quality improvement being embedded in AIM training, and the need to support everyone in developing these skills. QI shouldn't just be integrated into acute medical roles — it needs a progressive, structured curriculum, particularly at registrar level, that builds on QI learning at Foundation and IMT level. Our approach aligns with the HQIP guide to involving junior doctors in clinical audit and quality improvement, and with the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges' Training for Better Outcomes recommendations on developing quality improvement into practice.
By steering QI training and supporting QI certification, SAM can help focus the individual and collective energies of our trainees and faculty on bringing meaningful change.
The QI Committee has developed two training programmes:
- Acute Medics as Improvers
- Acute Medics Leading Improvement
Details of upcoming courses will be added to the events pages.
What's Coming
Over the coming year, we are significantly increasing the support we offer:
- An enhanced website — more helpful information, including a practical QI guide to take you from first idea to finished project.
- A national repository of successful QI projects — stored and shared in the internationally recognised SQUIRE SQUIRE both provides a template for creating an excellent QIP and offers a reporting structure that makes successful solutions straightforward for other units to replicate.
- Celebrating regional and local success — creating an environment where regional and local multidisciplinary teams are recognised for their work, and receive regular support to help deliver change locally.
Share Your Ideas!
The best improvement ideas don't come from committees — they come from our members!
If there's a problem you think Acute Medicine should be tackling nationally, a QI project you'd like to share, a solution that's worked in your unit, or a resource you wish existed, we'd love to hear from you.
Whether you've presented at national meetings before or have never taken a project outside your own hospital, your idea is welcome — email quality.improvement@acutemedicine.org.uk.
Join the QI Committee
If you would like to be part of this exciting development, we would be delighted to welcome you to the QI Committee. We keep the commitment manageable: twice-yearly strategy meetings, with informal monthly chats in between.
Interested? Please email quality.improvement@acutemedicine.org.uk
Start Improving
Our resources are just one part of what we do. Explore SAMBA, SAM-PLER and SAM SitRep, check the events pagesfor upcoming QI courses, and dive into the resources above!
Resources
NHS Education for Scotland
https://learn.nes.nhs.scot/741/quality-improvement-zone
HQIP
https://www.hqip.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Final-Quality-Improvement-QI-Tools-09-12-20.pdf
AoMRC
https://www.aomrc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Developing_QI_into_practice_0619.pdf
The Health Foundation
http://www.health.org.uk/publications/quality-improvement-made-simple
RCP
https://rcem.ac.uk/quality-improvement/
AQuA
https://aqua.nhs.uk/programmes/
TIPSQI