NHS England's Primary Care Transformation Team is offering a range of training and development offers to support those in practices and primary care networks to develop skills and confidence with using quality improvement tools and techniques. All training is delivered by experienced faculty members, which comprises of practice-based clinicians, non-clinicians and improvement experts who have worked extensively with general practice and wider primary care.

Session one: Demand, capacity and variation

This session will introduce demand, capacity and variation, including the theory behind them, and participants will consider why this is important and its practical application in primary care settings.

Learning about demand and capacity is one of the ways healthcare professionals can gain knowledge about what is happening in the system, and specifically about how well patients are accessing the care or support they need.

Session two: Managing demand and capacity

Building on session one, this session will consider the application of theory using real demand and capacity data. This will be an interactive discussion to understand data and generate ideas. Participants should attend session one first.

Session three: Failure demand

This session provides an opportunity to explore in more details the issue of failure demand which was first introduced as a concept in session one.

A contentious term, failure demand is not the failure of individuals, but rather failures within systems and processes which lead to duplication. This duplication ties up capacity and results in poor experience for the patient.

In this webinar, participants will look at practice examples and discuss how to find and reduce them. Participants must have attended session one in order to understand the theory of demand, capacity and variation. It is also recommended that session two is attended to build an understanding of how to collect and review data at practice level.

Session four: Need-led design

This session provides an opportunity to look at demand and capacity from a systems perspective. Participants will consider the definitions of "need" within the primary care setting and what it means in relation to "demand", before discussing how this information can be used to look at need-based design of services.

Before attending, it is required that participants have attended session one to understand the theory of demand, capacity and variation. It is also recommended that session two is attended to build an understanding of how to collect and review data at practice level.

Session dates

Session one will take place at the following dates and times:

• Wednesday 18 January, 12.30-2pm
• Thursday 16 February, 12.30-2pm
• Wednesday 8 March, 12.30-2pm.

Session two will take place at the following dates and times:

• Wednesday 18 January, 12.30-2pm
• Thursday 16 March, 12.30-2pm.

Session three will take place at the following date and time:

• Thursday 23 March, 12.30-2pm.

Session four will take place at the following date and time:

• Wednesday 29 March, 12.30-2pm.