CQC has today set out how it will work more effectively with Health Education England (HEE).
HEE is responsible for the education and training of people who work in healthcare such as: nurses, doctors, physiotherapists and healthcare assistants. This is monitored by them during visits to observe the quality of training.
CQC has published a memorandum of understanding, which gives details of the principles both organisations will follow.
The MoU has two annexes. The first covers acute hospitals and the second primary medical services. The agreements provide details on how both organisations have agreed to work together more closely, including sharing information.
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.
This guidance updates and replaces NICE technology appraisal guidance 111 issued in November 2006 (amended September 2007, August 2009).
The review and re-appraisal of donepezil, galantamine, rivastigmine and memantine for the treatment of Alzheimer’s disease has resulted in a change in the guidance.
Specifically:
donepezil, galantamine and rivastigmine are now recommended as options for managing mild as well as moderate Alzheimer’s disease, and
memantine is now recommended as an option for managing moderate Alzheimer’s disease for people who cannot take AChE inhibitors, and as an option for managing severe Alzheimer’s disease.
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 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.
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has rated the services provided by Staffordshire and Stoke on Trent Partnership NHS Trust as Requires Improvement following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
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?
We have now published two further prototype reports looking at how we might assess the quality of care in a local area in order to encourage improvement.
Looking across an area helps us explore, on behalf of people using services, whether local health and care services are working together in ways that reflect people's needs.
The project that has resulted in these reports on Salford and Tameside was designed to find out if we would be able to form a view about quality across an area as a whole. We recognise that our existing regulation of individual care providers, such as hospitals, care homes or GP services, needs to develop to reflect the changing ways in which care is being delivered.
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 King’s Fund was commissioned by Oxleas NHS Foundation Trust to work with their Quality Board to facilitate an assessment of its existing approaches to quality improvement and to develop a strategy for future work.
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.
Are trusts obliged to disclose investigation reports following serious incidents, asks Laura Paton. Please contact the library to receive a copy of this article - http://bit.ly/1Xyazai
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.
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