Barts Health’s ‘Safe and Compassionate’ plan recognises the enormous value of staff contributing to improvements in their services. This is underpinned by Listening into Action, and supported by training for staff in Quality Improvement.
We started by providing a three day course ‘Introduction to Quality Improvement’, initially assisted by the AQuA academy. This includes both a toolkit based around the Model for Improvement including good measurement techniques, sustainability and spread, and some supporting theoretical concepts including the role of human factors in error, stakeholder and team engagement and resilience.
Those attending include members of teams who are actively involved in delivering an improvement and prospective improvement champions.
Read Chris Hall's latest blog, a reflection on the national guardian role and its impact on local guardians.
This is the fourth part in a series of blogs from Chris Hall, freedom to speak up guardian at Hounslow and Richmond Community NHS Trust, in which he shares his experiences as a guardian and the difference his role is making to staff and the organisation's culture around raising concerns.
Providers should continue to ensure that they provide communication to families of people who have died using their services and those affected by serious incidents. By Laura Paton. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
The report makes recommendations about establishing the Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB) as well as how to improve investigation, and learning from investigation, across the health system.
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.
This guidance is intended to provide support to local commissioners and providers in implementing the access and waiting time standard for early intervention in psychosis (EIP) services.
It has been coproduced by a wide range of experts, including people with lived experience of services, to set out what works and provide a blueprint for localities to follow. It is not intended to direct but to support, by demonstrating the evidence and setting out clearly how progress will be measured.
Clinical summaries are electronic health record (EHR)-generated documents given to hospitalised patients during the discharge process to review their hospital stays and inform postdischarge care. Presently, it is unclear whether clinical summaries include relevant content or whether healthcare organisations configure their EHRs to generate content in a way that promotes patient self-management after hospital discharge. We assessed clinical summaries in three relevant domains: (1) content; (2) organisation; and (3) readability, understandability and actionability. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Minister of State for Community and Social Care, Alistair Burt, responded to an Urgent Question asked by Shadow Minister for Mental Health, Luciana Berger, in the House of Commons on the safety of care and services provided by Southern Health NHS Foundation Trust on Tuesday 3 May 2016.
Open access. Since its publication in 2008, SQUIRE (Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence) has contributed to the completeness and transparency of reporting of quality improvement work, providing guidance to authors and reviewers of reports on healthcare improvement work. In the interim, enormous growth has occurred in understanding factors that influence the success, and failure, of healthcare improvement efforts. Progress has been particularly strong in three areas: the understanding of the theoretical basis for improvement work; the impact of contextual factors on outcomes; and the development of methodologies for studying improvement work. Consequently, there is now a need to revise the original publication guidelines. To reflect the breadth of knowledge and experience in the field, we solicited input from a wide variety of authors, editors and improvement professionals during the guideline revision process. This Explanation and Elaboration document (E&E) is a companion to the revised SQUIRE guidelines, SQUIRE 2.0.
Mental health services have an important role in the treatment of people at risk of suicide. Many people who attempt suicide have underlying mental health problems, and the treatment of these issues is crucial to reduce their suicide risk. In other areas of medicine, since the publication of the landmark report To Err is Human,1 there have been sustained efforts to reduce adverse events associated with health care.1,2 Internationally, an awareness has budded that effective clinical governance is a vital component of high-quality health care. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
This was an opportunity to hear from a peer about Quality Improvement System and how it has helped staff to focus on the most important matters of improving the lives of the people who services and develop a culture of quality improvement.
This guideline covers identifying and managing depression in adults aged 18 years and older, in primary and secondary care. It aims to improve care for people with depression by promoting improved recognition and treatment.
In April 2016, recommendation 1.10.5.1 was deleted and replaced with a link to the NICE interventional procedure guidance on repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation for depression.
From May we will be inspecting SEND provision for children and young people by local areas.
We will also look at how well education services, social care and health work together to identify, assess and meet the needs of children and young people with special educational needs and or a disability.
We will carry out these inspections jointly with Ofsted and we have worked very closely with Ofsted and the Department for Education to develop the new inspection arrangements.
Safe staffing levels across the NHS have worsened significantly in the last year, according to UNISON’s UK-wide annual survey of nursing professionals published today (Monday), at the start of its annual health conference in Brighton.
Publication of report on closure of Bootham Park Hospital and eventual transfer to TEWV. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
uality improvement (QI) is becoming an important focal point for health systems. There is increasing interest among health system stakeholders to learn from and share experiences on the use of QI methods and approaches in their work. Yet there are few easily accessible, online repositories dedicated to documenting QI activity. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Open access. Since its publication in 2008, SQUIRE (Standards for Quality Improvement Reporting Excellence) has contributed to the completeness and transparency of reporting of quality improvement work, providing guidance to authors and reviewers of reports on healthcare improvement work. In the interim, enormous growth has occurred in understanding factors that influence the success, and failure, of healthcare improvement efforts. Progress has been particularly strong in three areas: the understanding of the theoretical basis for improvement work; the impact of contextual factors on outcomes; and the development of methodologies for studying improvement work. Consequently, there is now a need to revise the original publication guidelines. To reflect the breadth of knowledge and experience in the field, we solicited input from a wide variety of authors, editors and improvement professionals during the guideline revision process. This Explanation and Elaboration document (E&E) is a companion to the revised SQUIRE guidelines, SQUIRE 2.0.
No standardised tools for assessing the quality of specialist mental health supported accommodation services exist. To address this, we adapted the Quality Indicator for Rehabilitative care-QuIRC-that was originally developed to assess the quality of longer term inpatient and community based mental health facilities. The QuIRC, which is completed by the service manager and gives ratings of seven domains of care, has good psychometric properties.
Quality and patient safety are the highest priorities of provider boards. NHS providers will have noticed a renewed national focus on building cultures of safety and improvement across NHS organisations, and greater proficiency at learning from mistakes and spreading good practice.
Despite a strong reporting culture in trusts, evidenced by over 1.8 million entries into the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS) last year, widespread translation of reporting into routine learning and demonstrable improvement has yet to happen.
April 2016: Statement 4 describing the use of compression stockings was removed. This is because the guidance from NICE has been updated and the advice on using compression stockings has changed. All other information remains the same.
This guideline covers systems and processes for using and managing controlled drugs safely in all NHS settings except care homes. It aims to improve working practices to comply with legislation and have robust governance arrangements. It also aims to reduce the safety risks associated with controlled drugs.
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.
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.
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. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Incident reporting is widely recognised as an important method for improving safety in healthcare, and many countries have established their own incident reporting systems.1 However, the actual value of these systems is increasingly subject to debate.2 Reporting systems, both local and national, are overwhelmed by the volume of reports and fall short in defining recommendations for improving healthcare safety: ‘We collect too much and do too little’.3 To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
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
The first national, integrated whistleblowing policy has been published by NHS Improvement and NHS England, with the aims of standardising the way that staff are supported to raise concerns within NHS organisations.
Its release follows a public consultation on the draft policy, held throughout November 2015.
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.
PERFORMANCE: Older people’s mental health wards across Sussex require improvement, according to the Care Quality Commission. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
Health information technology (health IT) has potential to improve patient safety but its implementation and use has led to unintended consequences and new safety concerns. A key challenge to improving safety in health IT-enabled healthcare systems is to develop valid, feasible strategies to measure safety concerns at the intersection of health IT and patient safety. In response to the fundamental conceptual and methodological gaps related to both defining and measuring health IT-related patient safety, we propose a new framework, the Health IT Safety (HITS) measurement framework, to provide a conceptual foundation for health IT-related patient safety measurement, monitoring, and improvement.....To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
There is much debate within the improvement field about the value of RCTs in determining the effectiveness of improvement interventions. In 2007, Donald Berwick's monologue ‘eating soup with a fork’ provided a convincing argument for why the RCT was necessary for evidence-based medicine, but inadequate for evaluating complex social interventions such as collaboratives and campaigns. Since then, there has been an apparent ‘cooling’ in the appetite of improvement practitioners to adopt RCT methods in attempts to understand the overall impact of improvement initiatives. Against this backdrop, we applaud the authors in their attempt, which goes against the trend, but disappointingly, once again, offers conflicting and weak evidence of beneficial effect despite adherence to rigorous method. So what does this study teach us about whether or not to embrace RCTs in improvement? To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Quality improvement (QI) efforts affect a broader range of people than we often assume. These are the potential stakeholders for QI and its evaluation, and they have valuable perspectives to offer when they are consulted in planning, conducting and interpreting evaluations. QI practitioners are accustomed to consulting stakeholders to assess unintended consequences or assess patient experiences of care, but in many cases there are additional benefits to a broad inclusion of stakeholders. These benefits are better adherence to ethical standards, to assure that all legitimate interests take part, more useful and relevant evaluation information and better political buy-in to improve impact. Balancing various stakeholder needs for information requires skill for both politics and research management. These challenges have few pat answers, but several preferred practices, which are illustrated with practical examples
What was the issue? Aintree was in the lowest quartile of Trusts in relation to patient experience feedback from the national CQC mandated inpatient experience surveys; we set a Quality Improvement Strategy (2014-17) target for Aintree to be in the top 25% of organisations by 2017 . We needed to establish a timely process for relaying feedback to the appropriate decision makers in the Trust which supported them to act upon the needs and views of our patients and their carers/families.
QS117. This quality standard covers preventing excess winter deaths and health problems associated with cold homes. It includes people of all ages, and takes into account that some people are particularly vulnerable to the effects of the cold, such as people with cardiovascular or mental health conditions, young children and older people. For more information see the preventing excess winter deaths topic overview.
NG44. This guideline covers community engagement approaches to reduce health inequalities, ensure health and wellbeing initiatives are effective and help local authorities and health bodies meet their statutory obligations.
Adherence to medicines has been identified as a key issue by the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britain,1 the WHO2 and, most recently, by the UK Academy of Medical Sciences.3 Estimates of adherence vary widely but are often reported to be as low as 50%.4 When a patient does not take their prescribed medicines as intended, they may not derive the expected outcomes. As well as implications for the individual patient, this can result in increased costs associated with patient hospitalisations or avoidable escalation in other costs of care.3 It may also result in unused medicines, the cost of which is estimated at £300 million per year in England alone.3 To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Editorial. The term Lean means different things to different people. At Virginia Mason, it is applied to the management system based on the systematic identification and elimination of waste, defined as any activity that does not add value from the standpoint of the customer. First developed in manufacturing, and championed by the Toyota Motor Corporation, efforts to introduce Lean into healthcare have been met with some scepticism. ‘People are not cars’ has been the refrain of those unwilling to view healthcare as made up of processes that produce products and services, and that is thus amenable to improvement. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Open access. Improving healthcare services can all too easily become synonymous with the use of certain in vogue tools for improving quality. Trigger tools, run charts and driver diagrams are just three examples of techniques used by frontline staff who are undertaking improvement work. Educators seeking to teach improvement are similarly faced with long lists of possible approaches and techniques with which to fill their course descriptions. As a consequence the temptation for improvement leaders and teachers is to include yet another technique in an already crowded curriculum, to add in more ‘stuff’.
But what if focusing so much on the tools is actually unhelpful? What if our attempts to create better and safer organisations is muddled rather than enhanced by the growing interest in so many techniques? Could we be putting off the very people we need to engage by the use of what can be seen as jargon? Might it lead people to see improvement as an event or a ‘project’ rather than as a way of working?
Two nurses from Burton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust have led an innovative project that is putting information on ‘hot topics’ relating to quality and safety literally at the fingertips of nurses, midwives and nursing assistants.
Open access. Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) are important for evaluating mental health services. Yet, no specific PROM exists for the large and diverse mental health supported accommodation sector. We aimed to produce and validate a PROM specifically for supported accommodation services, by adapting the Client’s Assessment of Treatment Scale (CAT) and assessing its psychometric properties in a large sample.
This guide aims to improve patient care and clinical audit delivery by providing practical advice on how established RCA techniques can 'add value' to clinical audit. The guide is primarily aimed at clinical audit professionals and healthcare staff that participate in clinical audit initiatives at both local and national level.
In addition there are useful templates which can also be downloaded as separate documents below and adapted for your personal use.
PERFORMANCE: A review into the unexpected deaths of 18 mental health patients at an East Midlands trust has found “consistent failings” in the way staff carried out risk assessments when investigating the deaths. Contact the library for a copy of this article.
This quality standard covers the recognition, assessment, care and treatment of mental health problems in women during pregnancy and the postnatal period (up to 1 year after childbirth). It also includes providing pre-conception support and advice for women with an existing mental health problem who might become pregnant, and the organisation of mental health services needed in pregnancy and the postnatal period.
This guideline covers the period before, during and after a young person moves from children's to adults' services. It aims to help young people and their carers have a better experience of transition by improving the way it’s planned and carried out. It covers both health and social care.
Do OD is the expert resource on Organisational Development for the NHS, delivered by NHS Employers in partnership with the NHS Leadership Academy.
The NHS OD community came together to create a new tool to support Culture Change in organisations.
To maximise access, we turned the tool into a free app for smartphones and tablets.
The app now contains two tools:
1) The OD Culture Change Tool
This tool aims to help you on your culture change journey. It will prompt thinking and action and provides support and advice on culture change. The tool asks key questions to help you to think about what you might need to do to change culture. It will help you identify areas of strengths and areas of development. It offers pointers and practice resources which provide help and advice on culture change. At the end of each section you will be given a visual representation of your responses as well as an invitation to share any thoughts that the app has sparked for you.
2) Space To Think
The Space To Think cards have been created to support you to make workforce changes to deliver better quality care for patients. We’ve put together these cards for you to use as a digital toolkit to explore your ideas. You can use them to think about how to make change happen. Follow a particular path or shuffle the cards to help you think brighter about workforce change.
Quality improvement initiatives can become bogged down by excessive data collection. Sometimes the question arises—are we doing an adequate job with respect to a recommended practice? Are we complying with some guideline in at least X% of our patients? The perception that one must audit large numbers of charts may present a barrier to initiating local improvement activities. The model for improvement and its Plan–Do–Study–Act (PDSA) cycles typically require frequent data collection to test ideas and refine the planned change strategy. The perception that data collection must involve many patients can lead to insufficiently frequent PDSA cycles.1 In this review, we demonstrate the important contributions that small samples can make to improvement projects, including local audits, PDSA cycles and during broader implementation and evaluation. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens
Background The positive deviance approach focuses on those who demonstrate exceptional performance, despite facing the same constraints as others. ‘Positive deviants’ are identified and hypotheses about how they succeed are generated. These hypotheses are tested and then disseminated within the wider community. The positive deviance approach is being increasingly applied within healthcare organisations, although limited guidance exists and different methods, of varying quality, are used. This paper systematically reviews healthcare applications of the positive deviance approach to explore how positive deviance is defined, the quality of existing applications and the methods used within them, including the extent to which staff and patients are involved. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens
Objectives One important component of patient-centred care is provider incorporation of patient contextual factors—life circumstances relevant to their care—in managing the patient's health. The current study uses data sets collected from direct observation of care to examine if how a provider learns contextual information influences whether the provider incorporates the information into a care plan.
Quality improvement (QI) methods have been introduced to healthcare to support the delivery of care that is safe, timely, effective, efficient, equitable and cost effective. Of the many QI tools and methods, the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle is one of the few that focuses on the crux of change, the translation of ideas and intentions into action. As such, the PDSA cycle and the concept of iterative tests of change are central to many QI approaches, including the model for improvement,1 lean,2 six sigma3 and total quality management.4
Patient-centred care, defined as respecting and responding to the needs and preferences of patients, empowering them to make decisions that best fit their individual needs, has been identified by the Institute of Medicine as an essential element of high-quality care.1 It can be thought of as respectfully involving the patient2 in a way that helps practitioners provide care that is concordant with their patients’ values, needs and preferences while better enabling patients to actively provide input and participate in their healthcare.3 Patients are more satisfied with their care when they feel that healthcare providers are understanding their needs, carefully listening and clearly providing information4; in addition, patient-centred care has been found to be associated with improved patient outcomes.5 In order to provide exemplary patient-centred care, one needs well developed communication skills, especially in the realm of active listening and responding to patient cues. The importance of physicians mastering the art of patient-centred communication skills can be seen as a theme in the educational objectives of medical school curricula as well as in the competencies of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens
Quality improvement (QI) efforts affect a broader range of people than we often assume. These are the potential stakeholders for QI and its evaluation, and they have valuable perspectives to offer when they are consulted in planning, conducting and interpreting evaluations. QI practitioners are accustomed to consulting stakeholders to assess unintended consequences or assess patient experiences of care, but in many cases there are additional benefits to a broad inclusion of stakeholders.
In hospitals, breakdowns in communication has been found to be a major source of errors.1 Communication between clinicians can occur at scheduled times or rounds, through face-to-face meetings or may be facilitated through the use of communication tools such as pagers. For the latter, often urgent communication between clinicians about a patient is required. Problems in communication can result in a failure to rescue or result in poor coordination of care. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens
Objective Improving quality of life (QOL) is the central focus of palliative care support for children with life-limiting illness (LLI), but achieving this can be challenging.
Intervention MyQuality is an online tool that enables families to choose and monitor parameters they identify as having an impact on their QOL, which aims to improve patient–professional communications and also to enhance patient empowerment within healthcare dialogues.
Picker Institute Europe has published a new briefing; “Person-centred care in Europe: a cross-country comparison of health system performance, strategies and structures.” The document provides an overview of the different approaches taken to providing quality healthcare across Europe. Looking specifically at the person-centred care interpretations and strategies taken in England, Italy, Spain, Germany and the Netherlands.
Managing demand for planned health care is described in this report as a “wicked problem” – demand for healthcare is outpacing capacity to meet it.
Health economies have tried various approaches to managing demand; referral management centres, expanded roles, direct access amongst others. But the evidence base has been mixed, of variable quality and sometimes conflicting findings.
This synthesis of evidence sets out to understand what works but with a particular focus on context, to understand what works, in what settings and why.
The NHS in England faces the immense challenge of bringing about improvements in patient care at a time of growing financial and workload pressures.
In a report published today, we argue that the NHS urgently needs to adopt a quality improvement strategy if it is to rise to this challenge. All NHS organisations need to build in-house capacity for quality improvement and to commit time and resources to acquiring the necessary capabilities. They should do so by learning from the experience in trusts such as Salford, Sheffield and Wigan where quality improvement is well established.
Lean healthcare is claimed to contribute to improved patient satisfaction, but there is limited evidence to support this notion. This study investigates how primary-care centres working with Lean define and improve value from the patient's perspective, and how the application of Lean healthcare influences patient satisfaction. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
In February 2016, we updated this guideline to link to the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency’s (MHRA) toolkit to ensure female patients are better informed about the risks of taking valproate during pregnancy.
Dr Paul Lelliott, Deputy Chief Inspector of Hospitals (lead for mental health) has welcomed the publication of the independent Mental Health Taskforce's Mental Health Taskforce's Five Year Forward View for Mental Health.
Two £25 vouchers are up for grabs in the library’s ‘Making the Most of Information’ survey.
To take part, just visit http://goo.gl/AdN4ok by Friday 19th February.
We have published the first of three prototype reports looking at how we might assess the quality of care in a local area to encourage improvement. [First report covers North Lincolnshire]
Presentation from NHS Transformathon. Social media tools are developing at pace and offer many ways to bring about change in health and care. This session provides a snapshot of the global work of innovators, clinicians, patients and digital collaborators who have shared their learning online and explored the possibilities to improve patient care.
Innovation happens through connecting ideas and people. Social media enables connection at scale, pace and by flattening hierarchies. The presenters offer their different narratives of change, how this resonates with their communities and highlight analytics that can be used. This is a whistle stop tour of social media innovation which starts with a simple idea and develops to healthcare change with impact.
Presentation from NHS Transformathon. There many ways to understand how we make change happen. The Art of Change Making draws on the experience of a team of ‘enablers’ who have worked on complex system issues all across England and in some cases the world. The Art captures this wisdom in a simple to access guide to how to make change happen.
In this interactive session, we will explore with you several techniques and models that have proved helpful in running major national projects as well as organisational and community interventions. Be prepared to think about issues in your own place and come ready to explore them further with colleagues as part of our work together.
Presentation from NHS Transformathon. This session will show how, as a nation, Scotland is seeking to achieve large scale improvement in health and care through a combination of programme-specific activities and supporting development of sustainable QI cultures within health and care organisations. They’ll do this by sharing their experience of using a range of activities to support cultural change including the Building a QI Infrastructure Programme and Board development activities. They will also share their learning and outcomes from a specific example in the care of people living with frailty and delirium.
A new waiting time target for admission to acute psychiatric care of four hours should be introduced, a commission convened by the Royal College of Psychiatrists has said.1
The commission warned that access to acute care for severely ill adult mental health patients was “inadequate nationally and, in some cases, potentially dangerous.” There were major problems both in admissions to psychiatric wards and in providing alternative care and treatment in the community, it added.
The commission asked for a new waiting time pledge to be included in the NHS Constitution from October 2017. It wants a maximum four hour wait for admission to an acute psychiatric ward or for home based treatment.
Over the past few weeks, concerns have been raised with CQC by some Experts by Experience in relation to moving between their current employers and Remploy Ltd, one of the two organisations awarded new contracts to deliver Experts by Experience services from 1 February.
We will publish two documents covering foundation trusts’ requirements for 2015/16. This consultation includes:
our proposals for indicators to be subject to assurance in our detailed guidance for external assurance on quality reports 2015/16
our proposal to clarify guidance on how auditors should report a modified conclusion on their limited assurance work
an invitation for you to comment on who should provide the external assurance on quality reports from 2016/17
We will consider all responses in finalising these documents for 2015/16.
Four evidence reviews written to support work NICE carried out on staffing levels in the NHS have been released. Under the Freedom of Information (FOI) Act, the documents had been withheld to give NHS Improvement time to study them in their new remit to consider service improvement. The release of the documents follows an internal review of the FOI decision.
In 2013 the Francis and Berwick reports, published in the wake of care failings at the Mid Staffordshire NHS Trust, identified NICE as a key player to help advise the NHS on staffing levels. The Department of Health and NHS England asked NICE to begin work developing evidence based guidelines focusing on nursing care, one of the main drivers of patient safety.
Tara Lamont and colleagues discuss how researchers can help service leaders to evaluate rapidly changing models of care, with a range of approaches depending on needs and resources. To read the full article, log in using your NHS Athens
The aim of the project is to listen to children and young people’s views on how health and care services could be improved. To do this, we worked with Youth Action Wiltshire to train 12 people, aged 16-18 years, in skills such as safeguarding, listening and communication. They can now go out into the community and speak to children and young people about their experiences.