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I am Lauren Nicolson, Project Manager for Families Together East Lothian (FTEL), an early intervention support service to help families get the right support at the right time.
FTEL is voluntary and we typically work with families for around 12 weeks to ensure our work remains focused and meaningful. Everything we do is underpinned by our values of kindness and compassion.
I coordinate the day to day running of FTEL, including overseeing the quality improvement aspect.
Before joining East Lothian Council I worked in Action for Children, both within Respite and Residential settings and as Service Manager for Employability.
FTEL have been using a QI approach from the start of our work. We are a Whole Family Wellbeing Funding (WFWF) Collaborative Partnership and so we have national improvement advisors from CYPIC, and implementation leads from CELCIS.
Using QI has given us clarity on what we are doing, why we are doing it, and what measurable impact we could achieve.
QI has helped us to Understand our System by hearing what families in our communities really need. This data helped us understand what FTEL needed to be, and in turn, shaped our theory of change for the service.
We use QI to support a range of improvement projects, testing changes to find out what works best for our families.
We have established feedback loops from supported families, as well as the Voice of the communities. We use this data to help us identify tasks to continuously improve our offer.
We are currently testing a One Stop Shop where families can access multi-agency support. QI helps us to evaluate the data and impact, informing the next tests of change.
We are also working with CYPIC to help us refine what data we need for quality planning, management, and improvement. The support we have received from both the Scottish Government National Team and CELSIS has been immense and we are very grateful for their ongoing support and commitment.
For me, the lightbulb came from using the QI Journey to help us reflect on our ideas and being clear about our aims. We have lots of ideas - thinking these through and knowing how they fit in our theory for FTEL has helped us stay focused on these goals.
