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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Open access. Quality and safety in healthcare, as an academic discipline, has made significant progress over recent decades, and there is now an active and established community of researchers and practitioners. However, work has predominantly focused on physical health, despite broader controversy regarding the attention paid to, and significance attributed to, mental health. Work from both communities is required in order to ensure that quality and safety is actively embedded within mental health research and practice and that the academic discipline of quality and safety accurately represents the scientific knowledge that has been accumulated within the mental health community.
Improvements in health services require a range of technical skills, but like all complex organisational tasks they also rely on the personal skills and attitudes of the staff carrying out the changes. That much is axiomatic.1 2 3 Less certain, but surely potentially helpful to front-line staff undertaking improvement initiatives, is ascertaining just what might be the right sets of skills needed for different kinds of improvement tasks in varying circumstances.4 To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Although the Commission has improved as an organisation, it needs to overcome some persistent issues with the timeliness of some of its regulation activities if it is to sustain further improvement.
Open access. South West London and St George's Mental Health NHS Trust developed a system of weekend new patient reviews by higher trainees to provide senior medical input 7 days a week. To evaluate the effectiveness of these reviews, the notes for all patients admitted over 3 months were examined. The mean length of stay for patients before and after the introduction of the weekend new patient reviews were compared via unpaired t-test.
Despite concerns about the degree of compassion in contemporary healthcare, there is a dearth of evidence for health service managers about how to promote compassionate healthcare. This paper reports on the implementation of the Creating Learning Environments for Compassionate Care (CLECC) intervention by four hospital ward nursing teams. CLECC is a workplace educational intervention focused on developing sustainable leadership and work-team practices designed to support team relational capacity and compassionate care delivery. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.