Friday 23 May 2025 | 14:15-15:15

Format: Presentation

Stream: Leading

Content filters: Recommended for those working at system level in QI

Session chairs: Prachi Khanna Lived Experience and Communities Panel; India and Alexander Hijmering FORWARD; Netherlands

PART ONE: The power of diversity to drive improvement: how anti-racist thinking and practice will strengthen your improvement work

This highly interactive session will stretch your thinking about what diversity is (and isn’t); how it can strengthen your improvement initiatives; and how anti-racist thinking and practice can help you to shape more inclusive, effective improvement programmes.

We’ll share learning from Activate, a ground-breaking leadership development collaboration between two prominent health and care charities, brap and The King’s Fund.

Participants will leave the session better able to:

• Appreciate how racialised thinking leads to racialised outcomes which may limit their quality improvement efforts


• Mobilise a broad spectrum of allies across their organisations to champion more diverse, inclusive improvement practice (including White people, whose leadership on anti-racism can make or break change)


• Deploy practical anti-racist case studies in their own context to strengthen their improvement programmes

This session will showcase the work of emerging leaders across the National Health Service.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand and discuss the key aspects of anti-racist thinking and practice


• Start conversations that matter, with their teams and organisational leaders, on how more diverse and inclusive practices drive service improvements


• Use a range of case studies to demonstrate the evidence-base for strengthening their improvement work through a stronger focus on anti-racism

Anne-Marie Archard The King’s Fund; England

Kathryn Perera The King’s Fund; England

PART TWO: “Beyond our comfort zone”: addressing systemic racism, privilege and power to improve patient experience in a low-secure mental health unit

“Having worked in public services for many years, this is the best example of a clinically driven project that is genuinely making a difference. The way that you have truly co-produced in partnership with lived experience is fantastic.” (CEO, Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS FT)

Between August 2023 and June 2024, colleagues at Forest Lodge low secure inpatient unit in Sheffield were one of fifteen teams across England to take part in the first phase of the Mental Health Act Quality Improvement Programme – commissioned by NHS England and jointly delivered by Virginia Mason Institute and The PSC.

In this session, the team will share their deep exploration of the impact of systemic racism, privilege and power on the ward, together with their co-produced improvement work – some more traditional, some quite radical – to improve the equity of experience of all patients, and especially of those from ethnically diverse communities.

By the end of this session, participants will be able to:

• Understand what it means to apply an equity lens to all aspects of a hospital ward’s daily practice and decision-making


• Reflect on the nuanced manifestations of systemic racism, privilege and power in mental health inpatient care


• Be inspired by the potential for radical co-produced change which is both a journey of emotional discovery and underpinned by a structured improvement process

Kim Parker Sheffield Health and Social Care NHS Foundation Trust; England

Wendy Korthuis-Smith Virginia Mason Institute; USA