The CQC inspected core services at the trust, which provides inpatient and community mental health services, between 17 and 19 October 2016. As a result it is rated as Good overall as well as Good for being safe, caring effective, responsive and well led.
Black Country Partnership NHS Foundation Trust was previously inspected in November 2015 when it was rated as Requires Improvement and the trust board was told it needed to make a number of improvements.
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has rated the community mental health services for children and young people provided by Northumbria Healthcare NHSFT as Good following an inspection in September 2016.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
A. Liu, Q. Li, and L. Huang. Web Information System Engineering – WISE 2011, volume 6997 of Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Berlin Heidelberg, (2011)