Quality Action Newsletter No 3 | 10/2015
Summary
Doing the Right Things Right – Quality Action Conference 2016
Being part of Quality Action: Effects and Impressions – Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality (Spain)
Being part of Quality Action: Effects and Impressions – SENSOA (Belgium)
Doing the Right Things Right – Quality Action Conference 2016
We are pleased to invite you to the Quality Action Conference 2016!
The conference is the concluding event of the EU co-funded ‘Joint Action on Improving Quality in HIV Prevention’, involving 45 partner organisations from 26 Member States. It will take place in Berlin, Germany on January 26 – 27th 2016.
Quality Action is now ready to present lessons learnt and to work with you and all stakeholders towards sustained quality assurance and improvement in HIV prevention projects, programmes and policies.
Please join us in this excellent opportunity to take stock of the latest developments in improving quality in HIV prevention. We will present and discuss results and practical experience gained during Quality Action in interactive formats. Keynote speakers, HIV prevention leader Prof Kevin Fenton from Public Health England and quality improvement expert Prof Michael Wright from the Catholic University of Applied Sciences Berlin will stimulate discussion and exchange among trainers, practitioners and policy makers.
Highlights will be the launch of the Charter for Quality in HIV Prevention as well as the presentation of the policy kit with policy statements and strategic actions to support quality improvement in HIV prevention at the national and regional levels. Furthermore, the conference will provide opportunities to learn more about the concepts and tools of Quality Action.
The audience will comprise more than 100 participants, including government and NGO partners in Quality Action, representatives from ministries and public health authorities as well as representatives from the European Commission, experts and stakeholders from the fields of HIV prevention and quality.
We hope you will be able to participate in our conference and look forward to your application.
Being part of Quality Action: Effects and Impressions – Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality (Spain)
By Javier Toledo
In Quality Action, I am representing the Ministry of Health, Social Services and Equality, which is the Spanish governmental partner, and I work for the DG Public Health of the Government of Aragón. For a public health physician who has been directly involved in HIV prevention and services provision for people living with HIV for the past fifteen years, Quality Action represents a unique opportunity to collaborate internationally in this area. Quality Improvement must be embedded in our strategies if we want to achieve the objectives of the Action Plan on HIV/AIDS in the EU and neighbouring countries, namely to reduce HIV infections, to improve access to prevention, treatment and care and to improve the quality of life of people living with HIV/AIDS.
“Doing the right things right” has become a motto for those participating in Quality Action. For this reason, I attended the workshops in Dublin and Barcelona where I was trained in the QIP and Schiff tools. The workshops gave participants the opportunity to know more about the rationale behind the implementation of the tools and provided some practical application. In addition, we were trained to train other interested professionals at country or regional level. Some Spanish participants from NGOs and GOs have already had the chance to successfully apply the Quality Action tools to different projects, and we are now planning to apply QIP to the current Spanish HIV and AIDS strategy throughout this year.
Given the collaborative nature of the project, establishing good connections with other Quality Action partners has been a priority since the very beginning, and I am positive that these collaborations will last after the project ends in early 2016. In addition, I have had a chance to reach out beyond partners. I presented the project at conferences such as the Spanish 2015 HIV/AIDS Conference and I will present at the upcoming European Public Health Conference in Milan in October this year.
Like other projects at the EU level, Quality Action’s main strength lies in the opportunity to share knowledge and experiences with colleagues working in different organisations in various countries. Moreover, the project helped me improve my way of working, notably in involving stakeholders in all processes as well as in consensus building.
On the other hand, however, sustainability is a common challenge for this kind of project. We should do our best to carry on once the three year period of the Joint Action comes to an end. Personally, I expect to see the lessons learnt. At project level, it is essential that we disseminate the Charter for Quality in HIV prevention and the policy kit, which will be presented at the end of the project to all potentially interested parties at national and regional level. Partners in Quality Action should be actively involved in the dissemination effort and in promoting the use of QA/QI tools developed and adapted as part of Quality Action.
Being part of Quality Action: Effects and Impressions – SENSOA (Belgium)
By Sandra van den Eynde
Sensoa is the centre of expertise for sexual health in Flanders. In our centre, interventions are directed to several groups on different topics, including HIV prevention and to be as effective as possible is one of the key principles of Sensoa. We have a long-standing tradition of applying sound methods and innovative interventions in our prevention efforts towards targeted groups. For this reason we participated in four training workshops – PQD, Succeed, Schiff and QIP – and we thoroughly implemented two tools.
We applied Succeed to our outreach prevention work towards gay men, and we went even further by embedding the application of Succeed and PQD in the interventions with other target groups in our planning for the coming years (2016-2020).
The involvement of all staff and stakeholders made the application of tools a very empowering experience and an outstanding success. The training workshops were extremely useful to get the necessary support to apply the tools accurately, as well as to reach out to other European colleagues working on similar challenges. In addition, it was an absolute pleasure to participate in them! The trainers transmitted all their enthusiasm and made sure that Quality Action reached our hearts…where quality improvement should be!
Furthermore, being part of Quality Action helped us reinforce the existing collaboration with our Dutch colleagues, while establishing new connections with partners from the Netherlands, Ireland and Flanders.
The focus on quality, making it measurable and the creative, participatory and empowering discussions on how to improve the quality of existing interventions are definitely the added value of Quality Action.
As for every European project, the competencies acquired through the project should be sustainable without further support of the European Commission. In Quality Action, the mutual exchange of common challenges and the progress in the application of tools turned out to be very effective. It could be a great opportunity if we continue this exchange of tools application and invest more in national training activities.