Success in healthcare improvement is often measured by outputs – measurable changes, backed up by awards, ratings and accolades. What happens when these successes don’t hold under pressure? This session explores an award-winning initiative that achieved and sustained UK Healthcare CQC Outstanding status, built on the principles of Holocracy – a flat hierarchy, self-organising model of governance using Circles, implemented in 2016. While the model thrived in stable conditions, the COVID-19 crisis exposed its vulnerability, with leadership defaulting to a command-and-control approach due to urgency and risk. We’ll examine why well-researched systems can falter in crises and what organisations can do to adapt. Through reflective analysis, delegates will explore how to safeguard the gains of innovative leadership models during periods of uncertainty and external disruption.

Learn how this team revived and refined shared leadership models to meet modern pressures, and discover how your organisation can balance autonomy and accountability within a responsive leadership environment.

In this webinar, you will explore how to:

•  • Identify strong qualitative outcome metrics when doing the hard work of building trust as measurable social capital
•  • Understand the principles and limitations of Holocracy and flat leadership models in complex and dynamic environments
•  • Recognise how apparent success can mask systemic fragility and how to respond when leadership models fail under crisis
•  • Adapt and sustain change and improvement approaches and leadership models during periods of uncertainty, disruption and crisis

This session is designed for leaders, improvers and change agents who want to move beyond surface-level success and build leadership systems that hold when it matters most.

Speakers: Safa Moghul, Virginia Patania (The Jubilee Street Practice / North East London ICB)

Presented on 24 February 2026

Although prevention is key to reducing death and disability from injury, healthcare systems are essential for those injuries which inevitably occur, even in the most safety conscious countries. This is especially the case in low or middle income countries (LMICs) where most of the burden of injuries occur and where 40% of deaths are thought could have be avoided if there had been timely access to quality healthcare.

To understand how to improve healthcare services for injuries requires first an understanding of existing services. As part of the Equi-Injury Global Health Group’s work, funded by UK NIHR, we used multiple methods to rapidly and holistically assess quality of healthcare services for injuries in Ghana, Rwanda, South Africa and Pakistan. We used mixed methods to show how quality of healthcare, assessed using each of the Institute of Medicines’ 6 domains varies across contexts and how issues we found in our objective assessments map onto those highlighted by patient, community, healthcare worker and policy stakeholders.

In this webinar, you will learn about the use of frameworks to assist in assessment of health systems; understand the relationships between quality of care and patient outcomes; and think about how objective assessments and stakeholder views may diverge or converge.

Speakers: Justine Davies (University of Birmingham), Leila Ghalichi (University of Birmingham)

Presented on 28 April 2026

Patients are often left out of efforts to improve diagnosis, despite being central to the experience and consequences of diagnostic error. This interactive session introduces a multi-modal, co-designed approach to engaging patients in diagnostic safety – spanning surveys, interviews, co-design workshops, storytelling and arts-based methods.

Through real-world examples and practical exercises, participants will explore how different engagement strategies generate distinct types of insight and how these insights can be translated into meaningful system-level change. The session will emphasise approaches that move beyond traditional feedback mechanisms toward more authentic, equitable partnerships with patients and caregivers.

Participants will leave with a flexible set of methods and practical strategies to integrate patient voice into improvement work in ways that are feasible, impactful and responsive to diverse contexts.

Speakers: Kristen Miller (MedStar Health National Center), Kelly Smith (Michael Garron Hospital), Traber Giardina (Department of Medicine Baylor College of Medicine), Helen Haskell (Mothers Against Medical Error), Emma Doble (BMJ Group). 

Presented on 7 May 2026