Poster Guidelines

At the end of both the Planning for Quality course and the Quality Improvement course, we ask all participants to present a poster of their improvement work they have started on the Academy course. Below are a few helpful guidelines to support you when you put together your posters and examples of some of the posters which have worked well. At the bottom of the page you will also find the appropriate poster template for each course.

Practice your timing!

We let you know in advance how much time is offered per presentation. Depending on the size of cohort this is usually around 5 - 8 minutes with additional time for questions. We try our best to keep the day running to time, which means if you run over we will need to jump in and potentially end your presentation early! Please practice your presentation and do your best to keep to the time frame.

Less is more

We know it is tempting to show all of the amazing Quality Improvement work you have achieved however putting everything down on the poster makes for a very busy and confusing one! Take the highlights of the work you have done and consider using bullet points rather than typing out full explanations of all the work you have done and key results rather than filling the whole page with text. You can then explain in more detail whilst presenting.

A font size of around 60 tends to work best. When we get around 40 it becomes quite hard to read on the posters (which are printed out on A2). We project the posters on the day as you are presenting. You may find it helpful to print out an A3 version before you submit your final poster which will give you an idea of how the text is all working on the page. It often looks a lot clearer on a computer screen than when you view the whole page printed out!

Be Creative

We put together the poster templates to help guide you on the content we want to be seeing on your posters. However, these are your posters to take away and display back in your workplace - so tailor it to suit you! If you want to add some colour, or want to play around with the layout that is absolutely fine. We are more than happy for you to make these your own, but we do ask that you keep the headings the same!

Don't Panic

We are not expecting you to have a completed Quality Improvement Project at this stage! We are fully aware that over the 4 or 5 month period it is very unrealistic that you will have managed to complete your project. What we are wanting to see is what your project is, why you're working on that, what you have started to measure, and if you have started to make small tests of change what has this resulted in to date. We are also interested in your future plans on how you plan to progress.

We're here to help!

Please do use your coaches when finalising your presentation. They will have first hand knowledge of what works, what doesn't and can guide you in what to put down on the poster, and what you can cover off within the verbal presentation. If you are having technical difficulties, or are struggling with layout etc, Olivia can help out in terms of formatting your poster! Please do get in touch! Finally, we organise the poster printing - you just need to submit this in powerpoint format, and we take care of the rest.