Last week Trusts from Cornwall and Somerset met to look at how their services meet the needs of those living with a learning disability and epilepsy.
Cornwall Partnership NHS Foundation Trusts (CFT) Learning Disability Epilepsy Team met with staff from Somerset Partnership NHS Foundation Trust Community Learning Disability Team to look at how their services work to meet the needs of their patients and the different models of service design from a patient perspective.
Safe staffing decisions should be made locally and not be governed by ratios [brief news item]. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details
Routine outcome monitoring of CMHDs using PROMs was not shown conclusively to be helpful in analyses combining study results, either in terms of improving patient symptom outcomes (across 12 studies), or in changing the duration of treatment for their conditions (across seven studies).
England's Chief Inspector of Hospitals has told Surrey and Borders Partnerships NHS Foundation Trust that it must make improvements to some services following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
Overall, the trust has been rated as Requires Improvement for providing safe and well led services, and rated Good for being caring, effective and responsive to people’s needs.
Our Experts by Experience programme, which involves the public in its inspections, is expanding and looking for new recruits.
Experts by Experience are people who have personal experience of using or caring for someone who uses health, mental health and/or social care services that are regulated by CQC.
The successful winners of new contracts to provide CQC with Experts by Experience are the organisations Remploy in the North, South and London regions and Choice Support in the Central region. They are now looking for new Experts by Experience to join CQC inspection teams and help deliver other aspects of CQC’s work.
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.
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.
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
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.
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?
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?
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.