Below are a number of Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ’s)in respect of Associate membership of the West Midlands’ Pacesetters programme.
Q: What’s in it for me/ my Organisation?
A: By joining Pacesetters you/ your organisation will:
- Have access to existing local, regional, national and international ‘service improvement/ transformation’ and ‘equality and diversity’ networks
- Be part of networks that are taking forward tried and tested approaches to everyday challenges and issues
- Be able to access and support learning opportunities across sites and learning sets
- Have access to a range of tools and methods, as piloted and tested across sites
- Benefit from SHA – based expertise and specialist support specifically around the use of delivery checklists, frameworks and governance of projects
- Be supported by DH colleagues on legal compliance of equality and diversity legislation, as required
- Be joining a high profile, cutting edge programme of work where projects are based on:
- a robust, well evidenced and researched, baseline for the inequity being tackled
- the application of service improvement methodology together with a high degree of community involvement and engagement to tackling inequalities
- stringent monitoring and evaluation of projects based on a participatory approach
Q: What type of Service Improvement project(s) can we work on?
A: Ideally, you will rapidly roll-out projects based on existing interventions from participating sites.
There is also enormous scope for your site to work on practically any locally defined project – either patient focused or targeted at your own workforce – where there is a clearly identifiable inequity in existence.
Q: What will it cost us?
A: In monetary terms, potentially nothing!
Pacesetters is a programme of work aimed at complementing, supporting and strengthening existing structures, objectives, priority areas etc by allowing us to ‘look beneath the surface, change the way we think’, by ‘trying out’ approaches and learning ‘how to do things better’.
The project(s) identified and approaches tested should be small and discreet and therefore not command a resource injection. The SHA will fund one place (public transport cost) from your site at International Faculty Events and other Pacesetters learning opportunities (across England).
In LEAN terminology, Pacesetters is advocating that 'we work smarter not harder’.
Q: How do we join the programme?
A: In the first instance please contact the SHA’s Programme Lead, contact details below, to express your interest in
Balraj Singh Rai, Programme Lead 
Email 
0121 695 2478 
0796 959 7376
Q: What else do we need to know?
A: You must be ready and able to develop and implement a project utilising the tools and resources available from the SHA between now and March 2011, in the first instance.
External evaluation support will be made available to Associate/ Buddy sites for their Service Improvement projects – details will be finalised and confirmed in due course.
It is vital that local governance of Pacesetters must include an identified and named:
- Executive level champion/ lead in the Associate/ Buddy site
- Strategic lead for the programme – as the key link to the SHA and wider Pacesetters networks
- Operational lead for the Service Improvement project(s)
Remember:
If you always think the way you’ve always thought, you will always do what you’ve always done; If you always do what you’ve always done, you will always get what you’ve always got – to get different, do different, to do different, think different!
We look forward to working with you and welcoming you and your organisation on board.