A Learning Health and Care System is one in which there is an organisational commitment to capturing and sharing insights about problems that emerge and whether the proposed solutions work through analysing data of various kinds. This is similar to the quality improvement approach (see Section 4.3.1), but entails the organisation providing infrastructure to enable teams to identify & analyse a problem with health or care activity, harvest the learning from this to develop one or more possible solutions, test each solution and use data to decide if it helped alleviate the problem, then spreading this learning across the rest of the organisation – see Figure 8. Electronic records and staff / user interviews often provide the data for this cycle of activity, and the RDS can provide an excellent channel to disseminate the knowledge generated.

Note that a learning health and care system can be built at any level of activity from an individual clinical or care service to an NHS Board, or even the entire country.

Source: JW based on various publications and diagrams

See the Learning Healthcare Project's guidance on building a Learning Health System.