I just finished a talk at the Internatioal Quality Forum hosted by the British Medical Journal and the Institute for Quality Improvement. (The Twitter hashtag is #Quality2013.) What a thrill to talk here – making the case to Let Patients Help!

There was a timing glitch, though – they accidentally ended my talk 15 minutes early, so there was no question and answer. Attendees, if you’d like to discuss, leave a question in the comments here.

Updated 4/21 – URL for the video changed. Thanks, Joanne!

Here’s a two minute video from the Saskatchewan Health Quality Summit, where I spoke Wednesday and Thursday. (Click the image, or click here, to go view it on their site – the video isn’t embeddable here.)[2015 update: the video has expired]

What a WONDERFUL conference, here in Regina, Saskatchewan. First, the Health Quality Council is WAY ahead of most regions in the world re patient involvement: fully TEN PERCENT of the conference (60 out of 600) was patients who were there simply to be LISTENED TO and be part of the event. This region is much, much farther down the road than most people are, re viewing patients as partners.

Heck, most events can’t imagine spending a dime to include patients; then some of them have sessions trying to figure out what patient-centered means! (I’d like to include a smiley on that, but – really, people. THINK!)

Wednesday morning I had the thrill yesterday of discovering Helen Bevan, extraordinary speaker, in charge of transformation at the UK’s National Health Service. A title like that is often pretty empty, but this woman is deep and analytical and full of heart; what she talked about was real and tangible. (And we discovered we’ll both be presenting in a week in London, at the British Medical Journal / IHI International Forum!)

This morning the opening keynote was by the superb Brent James of Intermountain Health. Listening to him talk about fact-driven (data-informed) improvement efforts, with decades of real results, was like listening to gospel for me – a gospel that so many people can’t believe is real, despite the evidence. What a privilege.

And then I got to close the conference, ending with a standing ovation. What great people; what a thrill. Watch what these people are doing.

I wish I had a complete roster of all the truly impressive people – leaders, patients, and everyone – I met and talked and worked with. I’ve been to a lot of good events, and this one earns extra stars.

AND, this all happened because Paul Levy connected us, after he attended the same meeting a year ago. And in case you’re not yet convinced of the value of social media for connecting people, THAT came about because a few months earlier Paul had noticed the quality of their tweets at another conference, having previously blogged about them.

Remember when finding good like-minded people required a strong network of personal connections, or you’d never find anyone with important information? It was ages ago.