60 seconds with Sara Little
In her 60 seconds interview, Sara Little - Head of Quality and Efficiency at St Bartholomew's Hospital, tells us more about the improvement projects her team supports and how they are improving outcomes for patients, as well as patient experience.
What's your job title?
Head of Quality and Efficiency at St Bartholomew’s Hospital.
How long have you worked here?
I've worked here since 2016
What does your job involve?
I lead the St Bartholomew's Quality and Efficiency team, which is soon to be a team of 8.
The team supports a variety of strategic improvement projects on the site like the implementation of NatSSIPs, embedding The Patient Voice in improvement work, improving end of life care, rolling out a new pathway for our TAVI service and, more recently, the site’s Cost Improvement Programme.
All of these projects support our overall ambition to become the first hospital in the country to be rated as Outstanding for safety.
What do you like most about your job?
Many, if not the majority, of incidents of harm that occur in hospitals are a result of system failures. While my background isn’t clinical, I like being able to use my training in finance, economics and quality improvement to make care better for our patients.
In what way does what you do help patients?
The improvement projects the team supports directly impact patients by improving outcomes and/or patient experience. This is often one of the key drivers for starting an improvement project in the first place!
What has been your biggest challenge?
It is often easy to identify ways to improve quality by spending more money. A big challenge for us is how we improve outcomes and experience while maintaining or reducing costs.
How would you spend an ideal day off?
I recently returned from maternity leave so I don’t feel like I’ve had a day off since my son was born! So, I’ll say, when I’m not at work, I’m usually trying to squeeze in a bit of exercise in between hanging out with my one year old.
Tell us something surprising about yourself…
It is probably not that surprising if you’ve met me, but I grew up in Texas and moved to London about 7 years ago. While the Texas accent has long gone, I’ll always be a Texan at heart.