Call for Posters Utrecht 2025

Share your work with a global community of healthcare improvers.

Submit by yourself or with your team, and join a diverse range of projects representing the best of quality improvement worldwide.

Poster submissions are now open.

Call for Posters is open until 28 October 2024

The posters at the International Forum

Our poster displays are a valuable opportunity to tell colleagues and experts from across the world about your improvement and safety projects, and to help others learn from your strategies and experience.

Every year we have hundreds of displays demonstrating a wide range of improvement and safety projects implemented in local, national or global settings.

Displaying a poster allows you to showcase your ideas, innovative approaches and strategies, and contribute to improving health and care worldwide.

  • Showcase your achievements to key international opinion leaders and colleagues from around the world
  • Demonstrate ideas that work and can be adapted by others
  • Start conversations and collaborations with teams worldwide
  • Communicate your organisation’s work and share successes
  • Build your profile by displaying your work at a prestigious international event
  • Influence outcomes on a global scale

 

You can also read our Poster FAQ here.

How will posters be viewed?

Traditional poster displays

Poster authors attending the International Forum in person will be invited to display their poster in a traditional printed format and display it on a poster board. These will be organised by topic. More details, such as environmentally-conscious poster printing service options, will be provided when the poster results are sent in November 2024. Please note that this option is not available for online attendees.

ePoster displays

All poster authors will also be invited to create a digital ePoster which will be made available on our online ePoster platform, accessible for all attendees before, during and after the conference.

Put the spotlight on your poster

You will be able to showcase your poster in Utrecht through:

  • Oral presentations: Present your poster project to peers on one of our Poster Stages during a 5-minute allocated slot. These sessions will take place during break times to ensure you don’t miss out on any of the main programme.
  • Scheduled poster walkaround: Be ready to showcase your work to other attendees by standing next to your poster for one of our poster walkarounds.
  • Online poster stage for online poster authors Showcase your ePoster to peers by submitting a 5-minute recorded presentation. This presentation will be displayed on the virtual platform on either Thursday or Friday of the conference. Live Q&A chat with online attendees about your project will also be available.

 

Some additional networking opportunities for poster authors include:

  • Poster orientation: Find out more about the posters and activities on the Poster Stages, and meet other poster authors who will be presenting their project.
  • Poster presenters meet up: Connect with other poster authors who will be presenting their project within your submission topic. You will discuss common challenges and how to overcome them. This on-site activity will be facilitated by a poster champion and will include small group tours of selected posters.

 

Further information on all of the above activities, including how to sign up and present where applicable, will be sent to all registered poster authors at a later date.

The poster topics

Safety

Harm occurring during healthcare is a huge global challenge. Patient safety involves the prevention of this kind of harm through the effective mitigation of risk – and incorporating aspects of safety science including human factors. Patient safety also involves learning by reporting, investigation and change after events. This includes developing compassionate and inclusive restorative processes after harm has occurred.

We want to hear about projects that reduce the possibility of harm caused by healthcare but also submissions from those working in harm and risk reduction in other industries. From technological safety nets to organisational culture improvement, how are we keeping each other safe as we go about the day to day work of delivering healthcare, plan new services and work across professional boundaries. We’d be keen to see submissions from e.g. safety science specialists, risk management teams, leadership and investigators looking to share good practice.

For Utrecht, we are particularly interested in projects that demonstrate:

  • Taking a human factors approach to the prevention of harm
  • Learning by reporting, investigation and change after events
  • Safety-II: enhancing systems and learning from successes
  • Lessons from harm and risk mitigation outside of healthcare
  • The role of technology in patient safety
  • Embedding patient safety into organisational culture, across professional boundaries
  • Organisational Flow
  • Psychological Safety

 

People

We want to hear about your improvement projects where health and care professionals are working together with patients, carers or people with lived experience to co-produce a real difference to communities. This includes patient leaders who are creating real improvements to the experience of patient care.

We are also interested in healthcare professionals co-producing with patients, as well as co-production across social care and education sectors to improve health.

If you are a patient, or working in partnership with patients, to create better healthcare, we want to hear from you.

For Utrecht, we are particularly interested in projects that demonstrate:

  • Co-production in action
  • Advancing Equity
  • Health and wellbeing of staff
  • Finding human-centred hope for the future
  • Human and tech collaboration
  • Metrics that matter

 

You can find more detail on the above People topics here.

 

Populations

In this stream, we are recognising the imperative for improvement to meet the needs of the whole population. We are particularly interested in work that addresses one or more of the following areas:

  • How can we use approaches to understand need and plan care for whole communities e.g. large data sets, methods to engage and listen to communities
  • The application of improvement approaches that focus on a specific population group, health outcomes, health inequalities, equity or social determinants of health
  • Improvement across boundaries and examples of collaborations and or capability building across organisations and sectors (e.g. health, social care, education)
  • How technology is bringing new challenges and opportunities for scaling care across populations
  • Overcoming global health or inclusion health issues
  • How health systems or organisations are taking a systematic approach to population health and equity and sharing the impact

 

We are particularly interested in work that demonstrates articulation of the challenges and impacts that have been achieved.


Change

For Utrecht, we are particularly interested in projects that demonstrate:

  • New and novel methods for change
  • Partnerships for change (especially with people who use services and/or communities)
  • Making change happen across a whole organisation, system, region or country
  • How a theory of change helped you to achieve your aims
  • When high-performing teams become change agents
  • What you learned when change didn’t work
  • How to build collective intelligence about change

 

Science

This stream will showcase the best work that is applying the science of improvement with high rigour, and advancing the field of improvement science. We’re particularly keen to hear from people applying good design and evaluation methods in health and care improvement. We’re looking to define the approaches and methods being applied within health and care to improve quality of care, improve population health, tackle equity and enhance sustainability. We’ll be working with the Editors of BMJ Quality and Safety and BMJ Open Quality to highlight the best work submitted.

For Utrecht, we are particularly interested in projects that demonstrate:

  • Opportunities for AI in Quality Improvement
  • The intersection between implementation science and improvement science
  • Data and practical measurement of performance (including big data for improvement)
  • Evaluation and rigour
  • New thinking on spread and scale methods

 

Leading

Leading for better health is ever more complex and challenging, yet also ever more exciting since we have a constantly-growing base of evidence and experience on which to draw. “Leaders” can be health or care professionals, patients, community-leaders or others—we’re interested in all forms.

What does “leading well” look like today in a complex world with multiple needs and aims? How can leaders encourage progress at one and the same time across all dimensions where results matter: patient outcomes and experience; safety; population health and equity; sustainability/environmental health; cost; staff experience and wellbeing?

Submissions should include co-produced, creative solutions and strategies which are of practical use to people working toward better health – be they community organisers, ward team leaders or executives in large systems, charities or other organisations. And submissions which are grounded in practice and real-world application, not only in theory. We particularly encourage submissions which draw on experience across multiple countries and from younger, emerging leaders.

We are particularly interested in work that demonstrates the link between leading well and results that matter. We’re looking for content that is grounded in deep connection to people receiving care and motivates those providing care, often in complex and difficult contexts.

This stream will be developed in partnership with BMJLeader, the journal for evidence and debate in leadership across health and care.

For Utrecht, we are particularly interested in projects that demonstrate:

  • Leading effectively for diversity – including working with multiple generations simultaneously in the workplace
  • Leading for sustainability -including cost and access, environment/climate and an emphasis on waste reduction
  • Leading with kindness and compassion – helping people working in health and care to thrive and maintain their energy and humanity
  • Leading with engagement of people receiving care
  • Leading in difficult circumstances – leading oneself and others in challenging contexts and environments, including finding opportunities for collaboration for the greater good

 

Patient representation and lived experience

Submissions are expected to be co-produced with patients, service users,  citizens and carers wherever possible. We have representatives on these groups in all our planning committees, and are working to increase the representation of these groups as speakers and delegates. 

Notifying you

The results of poster submissions and information on the next steps will be sent out in November 2024.

Please note that the email address that you supply on the Submitter Details page when submitting your abstracts will be the email address used to correspond the results of your submission. If you change email addresses during this time, please let us know so we can update our system.