The Care Quality Commission’s Chief Executive, Ian Trenholm and Dr Paul Lelliott, Deputy Chief Inspector (Mental Health) will give evidence to the UK Parliament Human Rights Committee in early June.
High quality care is patient-centred.1 Efforts to promote patient-centred care in clinical practice should improve quality. Both shared decision-making (SDM) and the process of obtaining informed consent could be expressions of patient-centred care—to the extent that they respond to the advocates' call for ‘nothing about me without me’. In this issue of BMJ Quality and Safety, Shahu et al2 discuss variations in the quality of informed consent procedures, which could, in their view, fail to support patient-centred care in general, and SDM specifically. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Editorial. High quality care is patient-centred.1 Efforts to promote patient-centred care in clinical practice should improve quality. Both shared decision-making (SDM) and the process of obtaining informed consent could be expressions of patient-centred care—to the extent that they respond to the advocates' call for ‘nothing about me without me’. In this issue of BMJ Quality and Safety, Shahu et al2 discuss variations in the quality of informed consent procedures, which could, in their view, fail to support patient-centred care in general, and SDM specifically. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Health systems invest in diabetes quality improvement (QI) programmes to reduce the gap between research evidence of optimal care and current care.1 Examples of commonly used QI strategies in diabetes include programmes to measure and report quality of care (ie, audit and feedback initiatives), implementation of clinician and patient education, and reminder systems. A recent systematic review of randomised trials of QI programmes indicates that they can successfully improve quality of diabetes care and patient outcomes.2 Changes in surrogate markers such as blood glucose control, blood pressure or cholesterol levels are used to measure QI intervention effectiveness.2
However, investments in QI strategies are only worthwhile if the programmes that effectively improve care are sustained after trial completion.3. To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
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.
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