Our Themes of Work

Aqua is a trusted partner to health and social care organisations in delivering Analytics and Evaluation support, project measurement and research.

Our Measurement Masterclass programme is designed to give you practical techniques to bring your data alive, allowing you to better use data to support your improvement activities. The Quarterly Mortality Report is provided to Medical Directors, Clinical Coders and Service Leads in member organisations, and collates data from the Summary Hospital-level Mortality Indicator (SHMI), which reports on mortality at trust level across the NHS in England.

We also offer tailor-made Analytics and Evaluation support, whereby we will work with you closely to determine your needs and how best we can help.

Aqua has a proven track record of successful delivery with our Analytics and Evaluation work, which recently includes: analysis and interpretation of programme analytics and survey data for NHS Horizons for a large-scale national training programme aimed at health and social care staff; and engagement across over 50 Aqua member organisation and partners on quality improvement initiatives.

Implemented in 2014, our Lived Experience Panel is a group of five individuals who bring their experience of using health and care services to ensure that the voice of patients, service users, carers and the wider public is reflected in all the work that we do.

Aqua also provides bespoke work for both members and customers via consultancy by supporting you to build your own lived experience panel, to support your quality improvement work and actively engage in your improvement activity. This has been implemented in a number of both providers and commissioners across the region.

We know from experience that having someone with lived experience as part of quality improvement conversations can shift the direction of the work that is happening, and so we advocate for the involvement of lived experience in all areas of improvement work.

The Mental Health work that we do is based around a particular theme, with our most recent work being done around the theme of suicide prevention and trauma. This theme is determined each year as a result of the Senior Executive Quality Leads meeting, which is a space for executives in mental health providers to discuss their strategic objectives for the year.

Our Quality Improvement Operational Leads Network Meetings also support those leading quality improvement work within mental health providers by bringing them together as a regional network.

Alongside this, Aqua also provides bespoke work for members, consisting of tailor-made quality improvement training for mental health providers.

We are proud to be a part of the continued and growing emphasis around quality improvement within mental health providers regionally. We are seeing quality improvement teams embedded within organisations and networks being developed across organisations.

All of our Organisational Development work is informed by both quantitative and qualitative data, putting a range of recognised organisational development, quality improvement, team and leadership theories and tools into practice.

Great Organisational Development is understanding an organisation’s context and culture, working with communities and across systems, and enabling staff to curate and deliver excellent services.

We strongly believe in having lived experience embedded in all Organisational Development work.

Aqua is one of the largest providers of Personalised Care training in the UK, working with organisations including NHS Trusts, CCGs, local authorities, care associations and housing providers. We offer project-by-project services to customers, providing organisations with the skills to deliver safe, high-quality personalised care in any setting.

Our training gives you the tools to understand what personalised care is, and how to develop and implement this practice in a sustainable way in your organisation. We are very experienced in this work, with over 70 clinical teams having received training as part of our collaborative programmes.

Just one of our successful programmes was the National NHS RightCare Shared Decision Making (SDM) Programme. As one of three National Delivery Partners, we successfully led a programme looking at the culture for building and embedding shared decision making with 33 musculoskeletal, maternity and renal teams.

At Aqua, we want to empower staff members to identify the Quality Improvement needs within their teams and support them to find the best solutions.

We do this by offering a number of programmes centred around improvement, engagement, appreciative inquiry, lean thinking and improvement practice. We also offer tailor-made programmes for organisations looking to tackle a specific issue around Quality Improvement and capability building.

We believe that data is vital in determining what changes need to be made in your organisation, and whether those changes were successful.

Aqua offers a number of programmes to support organisations with improving Safety. Our programmes focus on Human Factors, Appreciative Inquiry, Safety Culture Surveys, Psychological Safety and Incident Investigation. We also offer tailor-made programmes for organisations looking to tackle a specific issue around safety.

We also host a number of networks, such as the Patient Safety Specialists network which brings together those leading on safety at organisations across the region, as well as supporting Integrated Care Boards and Integrated Care Systems across the North West to implement the requirements of the Patient Incidence Response Framework.

At Aqua, we always make sure that we are adding value to the existing work that organisations are doing around improving Safety.

Aqua’s System Transformation work is all about improving relationships and processes in order to improve outcomes. We bring people and their organisations together in order to collaborate in different ways. This work is highly relevant in the current environment, with the introduction of the Health and Social Care Act 2022 and the creation of Integrated Care Boards.

As part of our System Transformation work, we host masterclasses as well as running our own Leading Integrated Teams (LIT) programme, which is a substantial leadership programme aimed at supporting effective integration in systems and places.

However, it’s vital for us at Aqua that you receive the specific support that you need. This is why we work together with organisations and systems to design unique programmes that will be most beneficial for you.

Aqua is here to support organisations to meet the standards of the Care Quality Commission’s Well-Led framework, utilising our breadth of experience built since the introduction of Well-Led.

Our expert team will perform an in-depth review of your organisation to determine if:

• clear roles and accountabilities exist in relation to governance.
• there is active Board-wide engagement on quality, operational and financial performance.
• clarity on the functions of the Board and its committees is present.
• there is Board clarity and assurance on delegation, decision-making and escalation that cascades responsibility from the Board to the front line.

At Aqua we have in depth knowledge of the healthcare sector, being an NHS organisation working with over 80 NHS providers, commissioners and regulatory bodies. We are also able to draw knowledge and expertise from our accountants, governance experts, clinicians, improvement experts and analysts to ensure that the review we perform is of a high standard.