On Sunday, ACQUIRE hosted a pre-session on “Resourcing and retaining patient safety knowledge”. Dr Peter Lachman chaired, our co-directors Ruthpearl Ng’ang’a and Dr Mary Adam facilitated, and Dr Lydia Okutoyi, Prof. Sabelile Tenza and Dr John Fitzsimons presented. Our Kenya evidence asked a simple question: there is demand, where is the supply? 95.9% of the healthcare workers we surveyed want structured patient safety and quality improvement training. Training builds capability, but our systems decide whether that knowledge is kept and used. In group work, the room examined the challenge and proposed individual, policy and institutional level solutions, giving tangible examples of what has worked. An upcoming webinar will explore these examples in more depth.

On Tuesday, around 40 of us met for the ISQua Africa Community of Practice side meeting. Africans and friends of Africa shared what we need from one another, and we will hold a one-day virtual conference at a date to be confirmed for colleagues who could not be in Dublin. ISQua CEO Pedro Delgado left us with this: “Don’t wait for the environment to be perfect. Just go for it.”

We also met Jake Mickelsen of the Center for Innovation in Global Health at Stanford Medicine in person for the first time. Jake held our hand through ACQUIRE’s first virtual experiential quality improvement and patient safety leadership cohort in 2021. It was a most serendipitous and pleasant surprise to find him presenting at the conference, on “Building Improvement Programs that Sustain: Lessons Learned from 3 Hospitals in 3 Continents”. We look forward to showing him how far that first cohort has come: from eight hospital improvement teams in two countries in 2021 to 120 hospital improvement teams in nine countries in 2026.

What we are carrying home:
* Quality and patient safety takes endless learning, unlearning and re-learning. Patience in consistency is the main ingredient.
* Culture change takes courageous transparency to unlock psychological safety.
* Most of all, we were reminded that we light one another’s flame when we speak to one another.
* Hearing stories of the time it takes for effort to turn into change is what keeps the flame alive.

What conversation is your organisation avoiding that could unlock learning?

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