Introducing Medical Care

Medical Care – driving change is a collaborative resource hub to support clinicians and their teams to develop and deliver sustainable improvement, launching on 30 March at Medicine 2023 and online.

Medical Care will drive change by providing access to a wide range of inspiring and accessible resources on health service improvement and highlighting new and innovative practices to support clinicians to improve healthcare at a local, national and global level.

Dr Dan Smith is a respiratory consultant at Sherwood Forest Hospitals. He became editor-in-chief of Medical Care in September 2022, continuing work initially led and developed by Dr Sarah Clarke and Dr John Dean. Dan has experience leading local and national quality improvement programmes, as well as having a keen interest in supporting and developing the medical workforce. Dan was one of the clinical leads for NHS England for the Modern Ward Round collaborative.

About Medical Care Content

Medical Care has four main themes: Leading and delivering change, Patient safety, Digital innovation and Clinical pathway improvement. The key aim for Medical Care is to share the whole story or journey of best practice – not just isolated examples– and support implementation of any improvement work. Take the example of our focused topic for launch:

Sustainability in healthcare. Medical Care’s content demonstrates why the topic is important to everyone in healthcare, including our most important stakeholder, patients. We then provide examples of ideas for innovation for improvement and, finally, provide support in their delivery through interactive webinars and discussions

We recognise how busy everyone is and how a lot of improvement work is often squeezed in between delivering direct patient care. For this reason, another key aim is to provide resources that are accessible to all healthcare professionals across a range of devices and platforms. If you have 5 minutes spare and usually browse social media for content, we have a mixture of videos, podcasts, peer-reviewed articles and blogs.

 If you have a bit more time, we host extended content for those who want more detailed information, including interactive sessions with experts. As an online portal that’s optimised and integrated with social media, Medical Care can be extremely agile and bring people together from different specialties – and from across the world.

 Medical Care will have a featured theme, refreshed every 2 weeks, with a range of resources exploring all that you would hope and need to know about that topic. Medical Care will be comprehensive at launch, with brilliant resources across our themes, but it will be constantly evolving as we commission new content and in response to feedback

I’m excited by the opportunity to collaborate with colleagues from a range of professions and specialties. Our fantastic group of content advisers are our strategic guides and main source of inspiration. They may be representing their organisation and sharing their expertise, or representing one of the many medical societies or key partners, including NHS England, Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch and Getting It Right First Time, who are all working with the team.

Our colleagues from the RCP Patient and Carer Network also provide invaluable advice on each of our topics on areas of improvement to prioritise and contribute to a regular feature on the site: The Patient Voice.

I also need to thank colleagues at the RCP, who will be vital to the success of Medical Care. There is tangible excitement at the college and everyone has been fantastic in sharing their experience and advice. The site will highlight, host and direct users to content from across the college including the Education, Events, Journals and Improvement teams, helping to disseminate the brilliant content that the college creates.

Plus, we will ensure content represents and is delivered to benefit the broad range of members and fellows – and I am thankful to the regional, national and global teams for their input and guidance.

In addition to our brilliant clinical advisers and collaborating organisations, we will need feedback from members, so we can tailor content that is interesting and relevant to clinicians’ work.

There are opportunities to feedback on the site; navigate to the Get involved section to find templates for case studies, quality improvement projects and blogs for users to submit their own work to the site. We will also be attending Medicine 2023 and hope to meet as many of our key partners as possible in person. We are also keen for colleagues to guide future areas of content by applying to become a guest editor, working alongside me and the team to curate and develop new content. If you want to get involved prior to launch, email medicalcare@rcp.ac.uk

Eddie Kinsella

Patient and Carer Network (PCN) chair

Patient and Carer Network (PCN) chair The (PCN) welcomes the creation Medical Care and we are pleased to help shape its development from the outset. Given the unrelenting pressures on the healthcare system, this initiative is particularly timely. It is more important than ever to create a readily accessible ‘treasure trove’ of best practice guidelines, case studies and new improvement initiatives that can be applied to local circumstances.

Dr David Green

RCP QI fellow

One of the biggest challenges I face in QI work is trying to get an overarching view of what others are doing in my area of interest. I’m excited to watch people share and progress improvement work together. It’s a really great opportunity and I’m looking forward to it taking off’.

Dr Aicha Bouraoui

RCP Trainees Committee representative

People are the true power to drive change. Relationships are key in any improvement journey, and relationships need to be underpinned by trust, connection, empathy and patience. I’m very delighted to be part of Medical Care journey to bring people, clinicians and service users, together, put our shared values in action, and mobilise and organise resources effectively to drive high quality care for all’

Sue Latchem

Executive director of care quality, RCP

During my professional career I had to rely on printed learning materials, journals and annual professional conferences to keep up to date and aware of emerging good practice. Even then, learning was provided in isolation to my profession, without opportunities to learn as part of a team. Medical Care creates a great opportunity to interact with learning from clinical teams. I encourage you to be a part of it, whatever your clinical background.

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