Health Foundation's Q CommunityFunding
Overview
Membership of Q is free.
Opportunities to join Q are open on a continuous basis:
To join, visit their website.
Supporting Q Connections
This opportunity is open to Q members, and Q partner organisations, who are connecting the Q community in their local or thematic area.
Grants of up to £20,000 are available for activities focused on supporting continued collaborative working at a time of intensified system pressure. They’re interested in funding activities that help members to build and strengthen their networks across the improvement landscape, and share and apply learning.
Criteria
Proposals should focus on one or more of the following areas of interest:
- Activities that support applied peer learning (eg funding for Communities of Practice or Action Learning Sets).
- Events, such as workshops and webinars, that build an understanding of and engagement in Q.
- Network analysis to further develop networking groups in Q.
- Activities and capacity for a more detailed diagnosis of what needs a specific group has, to strengthen network design, and to develop skills to evolve the group.
- To fund one or more convenor roles. For example, to make the activities above possible or to sustain a Special Interest Group.
Applicants will need to provide a clear rationale for the activities and methods chosen and demonstrate how these will lead to tangible outputs or meaningful outcomes that benefit the Q community.
This funding opportunity is open to anyone looking to develop networking opportunities where Q members directly benefit.
Q Exchange
Q Exchange offers Q members the chance to develop project ideas and submit bids for up to £40,000 of funding.
For Q Exchange in 2024, they have £800,000 of funding for the programme. It is delivered by Q and jointly funded by the Health Foundation and NHS England.
Their collaborative online process supports you to refine and develop your project ideas with the help of the Q community.
The theme for Q Exchange this year is:
How can we improve across system boundaries?
They are looking for proposals that involve two or more parts of the health and care system and focus on improving the quality and efficiency of the interface between different sectors. For example, care at home, primary care and the community sector.
Projects should relate to one or more of the following areas:
- Reducing waits sustainably and equitably.
- Increasing productivity and reducing waste.
- Boosting the culture, capabilities and structures needed for learning and improvement.
- Embedding improvement into management systems and processes.
They are looking for projects with potential for insights or interventions that are scalable. We expect proposals to show proactive links to local or national priorities and structures, as well as making active use of the Q community.
Improving productivity is an especially difficult but pressing challenge for the sector. Connecting your ideas to the holistic benefits you can achieve and showing the potential to inspire productivity gains alongside other objectives will be important to sustaining and spreading the work.
Project teams must be led by a Q member for the duration of the project but can involve people who are not yet part of the community.