Julia De Soyza - Newcastle Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust

Hello – my name is Julia De Soyza and I am an Improvement Facilitator in the Newcastle Improvement team.

Our role is to support improvement in the Trust.

Improvement is really just change that makes things better for patients and for staff.

We support improvement by working with teams and use an approach that is based on improvement methodology.

We also offer advice and support to teams so they can lead changes that are important to them in their own areas.

The team is made up of staff from many backgrounds including finance, performance, research, NMAHPs and more!

Improvement is a simple and effective process and can be done by anyone. You don’t need to be an expert.

My journey into NHS improvement

I have worked as a nurse in Newcastle since 1993, when I started my training. My most recent nursing role was as a nurse specialist in the Pulmonary Hypertension service.

The service is part of a national network of specialist centres and adheres to service specifications. Newcastle was not meeting several national standards and I made some suggestions of areas we could focus on.

This led to me to leading some improvement work in the service.

I needed support and advice from various people across the organisation to help with things like demand and capacity and looking at data as these were not things I’d done before. What I did have was a strong desire to make things better for our patients and the expert knowledge of the service.

With the support of my own team, we implemented changes to our referral processes which resulted in huge improvements to how quickly we were able to see new patients. The changes were sustainable, and we exceeded the national targets that we had failed to meet previously.

In my role now, I know that working with colleagues who are driven to make a change, is the key to successful, sustainable improvement.

It was not long after when an opportunity for a secondment into the improvement team came along and I now work in the team permanently.

Why I love my job

I have had great opportunities in this role to work with colleagues across the organisation. I have been involved in small and large scale changes. I always really enjoy working with MDTs and love going back into clinical areas to support teams with their improvements that will directly impact patient care.

I’ve also had great opportunities to professionally develop by becoming an improvement coach through training with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and I hope to do further training with them next year.