Quality Improvement Network Meet Up #6

Wednesday, 19 November 2025 (12 - 1pm) on MS Teams

Sustained Improvement or Transient Gain?
A New Algorithm for Statistical Process Control Analysis

Presenter:
Dr Thomas Woodcock, Senior Research Fellow, School of Public Health, Imperial College London

Statistical Process Control (SPC) charts are widely used in healthcare to monitor performance and determine whether changes represent genuine improvement or just random variation. A common challenge is knowing when a change is big enough and stable enough to be considered sustained improvement – the new normal – rather than a short-term fluctuation.

In this session, we will introduce the key ideas of SPC and discuss our new Stable Shift Algorithm, which helps address this challenge by identifying when performance has genuinely moved to a new level. This is important because it allows teams to distinguish sustained improvement from temporary gains, avoiding premature assessment of success.

Why it matters:

• Solves a real problem facing SPC users, and prevents resetting baselines too soon

• Builds on SPC principles familiar to quality improvement teams

• Flexible enough to work with different projects and settings
  
  

In summary, the algorithm offers a clear and consistent approach to identifying lasting progress, supporting large-scale and rigorous analysis of quality improvement efforts.

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