Monitor requires all NHS foundation trusts to produce reports on the quality of care as part of their annual reports. Quality reports help trusts to improve public accountability for the quality of care they provide.
Prescribing errors occur in up to 15% of UK inpatient medication orders. However, junior doctors report insufficient feedback on errors. A barrier preventing feedback is that individual prescribers often cannot be clearly identified on prescribing documentation. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
CQC is carrying out a review of how NHS trusts identify, report, investigate and learn from deaths of people using their services.
This follows a request from the Secretary of State for Health, which was part of the Government’s response to a report into the deaths of people with a learning disability or mental health problem in contact with Southern Health Foundation NHS foundation Trust.
CQC’s review will consider the quality of practice in relation to identifying, reporting and investigating the death of any person in contact with a health service managed by an NHS trust; whether the person is in hospital, receiving care in a community setting or living in their own home. The review will pay particular attention to how NHS trusts investigate and learn from deaths of people with a learning disability or mental health problem.
NICE has updated its guidelines pages to explain how they should be used in offering patients and service users the best care.
The new wording explains that guidelines should be taken fully into account but that the patient, or person receiving care, should be at the heart of decision-making. It also emphasises the importance of a clinician’s expertise and judgement.
The change is in response to conversations NICE has been having with people – including GPs. The new wording reflects NICE’s broader responsibilities within health and social care.
Our 2016 to 2021 strategy sets out an ambitious vision: a more targeted, responsive and collaborative approach to regulation so more people get high-quality care.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) today publishes the findings of a short-notice, focussed inspection of Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust, conducted over four days in January 2016.
In May 2016, a new recommendation was added on providing information about olanzapine when choosing antipsychotic medication for children and young people with a first episode of psychosis.
The independent Expert Advisory Group (EAG) report, advising the Secretary of State for Health on the creation of the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB), makes the case that there is room for improvement for investigation capability throughout the NHS.
The EAG’s advice is that HSIB should be an exemplar for the whole health system on how to undertake learning-oriented safety investigations, helping those in the system improve rather than taking on the majority of investigations itself.
Published today, the Care Quality Commission’s five year strategy, includes a greater focus on using the voices of patients, service users and their families, along with other information, to target inspections.
CQC is responsible for monitoring, inspecting and regulating health and social care in England. The new strategy sets out how CQC will combine learning from inspections with better use of intelligence from the public and others to focus inspections more tightly on where people may be at risk of poor care.
The National Guardian Office has published a document to explain where a local guardian sits in an organisation and the principles which underpin their role to help to improve the culture around raising concerns.
The document, entitled Freedom to speak Up Guardians - Purpose and key principles of the role includes principle examples.
Hospital board members are asked to consider large amounts of quality and safety data with a duty to act on signals of poor performance. However, in order to do so it is necessary to distinguish signals from noise (chance). This article investigates whether data in English National Health Service (NHS) acute care hospital board papers are presented in a way that helps board members consider the role of chance in their decisions. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you requesting.
NHS Improvement has launched its single oversight framework consultation.
The framework sets out how the regulator will identify where trusts may benefit from, or require, support in key areas of performance.
We say the new framework is significant for all providers and marks a shift in the regulator's approach
Barnet, Enfield and Haringey Mental Health NHS Trust (BEH) is embarking on a new era in their quality improvement journey.
BEH is teaming up with Haelo, the Innovation and Improvement Science Centre founded at Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust, (SRFT) as part of their world-renowned quality improvement programme.
Birmingham and Solihull Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust (BSMHFT) has achieved outstanding results for this year for PLACE assessments (Patient Led Assessments of the Care Environment).
Overall organisational scores exceeded the national average in all six categories, which assess how care environments support patients’ care in areas such as: cleanliness; food and hydration; privacy, dignity and wellbeing; the condition, appearance and maintenance of the dementia and disability environment.
The ‘5 whys’ technique is one of the most widely taught approaches to root-cause analysis (RCA) in healthcare. Its use is promoted by the WHO,1 the English National Health Service,2 the Institute for Healthcare Improvement,3 the Joint Commission4 and many other organisations in the field of healthcare quality and safety. Like most such tools, though, its popularity is not the result of any evidence that it is effective.5–8 Instead, it probably owes its place in the curriculum and practice of RCA to a combination of pedigree, simplicity and pedagogy...........To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Participation to the survey is open to all health and social care providers, is a 12 month subscription and will cost between £2,000-£4,000 dependent on the number of complaints you receive per annum.
Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust and East London NHS Foundation Trust have become the first two NHS mental health trusts in England to be awarded overall ratings of outstanding, as detailed in inspection reports published today (Thursday 1 September).
The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) has issued new guidelines on what is known as harmful sexual behaviour. As well as sexting (sending sexually explicit pictures or messages via smartphone) it also includes other age inappropriate sexual behaviour such as watching extreme pornography or making inappropriate remarks.
The Mental Health Five Year Forward View Dashboard, published in October 2016, is a response to the recommendation in the Five Year Forward View for Mental Health that NHS England create a tool “that will identify metrics for monitoring key performance and outcomes data and that that will allow us to hold national and local bodies to account for implementing this strategy.”
It includes a suite of metrics based on the proposals in the Implementation Plan and is structured around the core elements of the mental health programme
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has found that Devon Partnership NHS Trust has maintained a high standard in the quality of services for patients.
The Care Quality Commission has told Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust that it must make significant improvements to its community-based mental health services for adults of working age, following its latest inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
The NHS is today publishing guidance to help trusts work with bereaved families and carers.
Over 70 families and carers worked with NHS England on the guidance which will provide advice to hospitals, mental health and community trusts on how to involve families following the death of a loved one.
Open access. Several countries have national policies and programmes requiring hospitals to use quality and safety (QS) indicators. To present an overview of these indicators, hospital-wide QS (HWQS) dashboards are designed. There is little evidence how these dashboards are developed. The challenges faced to develop these dashboards in Dutch hospitals were retrospectively studied.
South West London and St George’s Mental Health Trust has been rated Good overall by the Care Quality Commission.
The trust which serves five London boroughs was rated Good for being safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has announced the reappointments of Sir Robert Francis QC and Paul Rew as non-executive directors for a second three-year term.
Find out about the progress made by trusts to date in relation to the appointment of Freedom to Speak Up (FTSU) guardians and how Dr Hughes and her office are supporting guardians to improve the culture of speaking up safely.
These Specialised Services Quality Dashboards (SSQD) are designed to provide assurance on the quality of care by collecting information about outcomes from healthcare providers. SSQDs are a key tool in monitoring the quality of services, enabling comparison between service providers and supporting improvements over time in the outcomes of services commissioned by NHS England.
Open access. Although previous research suggests that different kinds of patient feedback are used in different ways to help improve the quality of hospital care, there have been no studies of the ways in which hospital boards of directors use feedback for this purpose.
During the weeks either side of the Easter holidays the Trust will focus on working differently, testing new ideas; and with local partners such as local authorities and other community providers keep ‘patient flow’ as smooth as possible.
This means resolving any blockages in a patient’s pathway on the same day to ensure the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and the Princess Royal Hospital in Telford do not go into the following day with any unresolved patient issues.
This guideline covers assessing and reducing the risk of venous thromboembolism (VTE or blood clots) and deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in people aged 16 and over in hospital. It aims to help healthcare professionals identify people most at risk and describes interventions that can be used to reduce the risk of VTE.
North Staffordshire Combined Healthcare NHS Trust is among just a handful of organisations to feature in a new Care Quality Commission (CQC) report showcasing how mental health trusts have led by example in raising standards.
The CQC’s ‘Driving Improvement’ report focusses on a select few mental health trusts that, like Combined Healthcare, have achieved significant improvement in their CQC ratings.
Audit and feedback improves clinical care by highlighting the gap between current and ideal practice. We combined best practices of audit and feedback with continuously generated electronic health record data to improve performance on quality metrics in an inpatient setting.. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Free access. All healthcare systems show variation in the quality of care provided, whether that means access to primary care services,1 ambulance response times,2 Accident & Emergency waiting times3 or treatment processes and outcomes.4–6 Monitoring this variation in quality can serve multiple purposes: informing patients about where best to seek care;7 allowing clinicians to compare their performance with that of their peers and thus identify targets for local-level quality improvement efforts, and supporting the development of national policy. Though, what all these have in common is a trust in the reliability of the data to adequately reflect healthcare quality—sometimes a questionable assumption.
In BMJ Quality and Safety, Hofstede et al 8 have addressed a common situation where providers (such as hospitals, general practices or community teams) are ranked according to their performance on a quality indicator.
As part of its work to improve staff engagement scores on the NHS Staff Survey, Lincolnshire Community Health NHS Trust has taken inspiration from the London Underground to develop a staff engagement tube map.
The case study looks at how the trust aimed to improve its Care Quality Commission rating and NHS Staff Survey score by focused on getting three areas right.
Open access. The growing interest in hospital users’ complaints appears to be consistent with recent changes in health care, which considers the patient’s voice a valuable information source to improve health care. Based on the assumption that the clinicians’ lived experience is an essential element of health care and to neglect it may have serious consequences, this study aimed to explore how physicians experience hospital users’ complaints and the associated mediation process.
Health inspectors say there has been a “significant improvement” in how public sector organisations work together to provide services for older people who need care in Stoke-on-Trent.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) has revisited the city to look at how well older people – and specifically those over 65 – can move through the health and social care system following an initial inspection in September 2017.
This guideline covers diagnosing and managing chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) in people aged 16 and older, which includes emphysema and chronic bronchitis. It aims to help people with COPD to receive a diagnosis earlier so that they can benefit from treatments to reduce symptoms, improve quality of life and keep them healthy for longer.
Researchers at the University of York have shown that costly external NHS hospital inspections are not associated with improvements in quality of care.
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has rated the services run by Mersey Care NHS Foundation Trust as Good, following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
CQC carried out an inspection at the trust during October and December 2018, overall the trust has maintained its rating of Good. In respect of safe, effectiveness, responsiveness and caring, the trust has been rated as Good. In respect of well led the trust have been rated as Outstanding. This is an improvement on their last inspection, March 2017, when safety was rated as Requires Improvement.
The Care Quality Commission has rated the care being provided by MOSAIC to be Outstanding after an inspection in January 2019.
MOSAIC is a substance misuse service operated by Stockport Metropolitan Borough Council and provides support and treatment for people with drug and alcohol issues, as well as support for young people whose parents misuse substances.
The local authority area data profiles bring together data to give an indication of how different services work together, providing a picture of the health and social care system in each local authority area.