Suchmaschinen benötigen trotz ausgefeilter Algorithmen menschliche Bewerter der Suchresultate. Ein ziemlich aktueller Leitfaden vom März 2011 erklärt, wie Quality Rater gegen Spam vorgehen sollen und die Nützlichkeit von Webseiten einschätzen. Falls eine Seite nur dafür existiert Geld zu machen, ist die Seite Spam. . Die PDF-Datei der Rating Guidelines ist mit dem Datum 30.März 2011 [...]
AQUA - Automatic Quality Assessment and Feedback in eLearning 2.0
The current development of Web 2.0 makes the distinction between author and reader fading away. Users now produce huge amounts of data which sometimes is of questionable quality. This leads to the problem of information overload: how to make the most of this information without overwhelming the users? One key challenge to solve this issue is to assess the quality of the user generated content.
In AQUA, we seek to develop algorithms to assess the quality of content automatically. We focus on two sources for this assessment: (1) user generated content; (2) feedback by users of the content. To do so, we investigate techniques from the fields of natural language processing (NLP), information retrieval, and machine learning.
So, in a nutshell, AQUA will answer the following questions:
What is quality of information? How does it matter in information search?
How to model the quality of user generated content?
How far can you go with automatic methods in assessing quality?
How to give feedback to users regarding quality?
The AQUA project is associated with the project "Mining Lexical-Semantic Knowledge from Dynamic and Linguistic Sources and Integration into Question Answering for Discourse-Based Knowledge Acquisition in e-learning (QA-EL)".
SONAR is an open source quality management platform, dedicated to continuously analyze and measure source code quality, from the portfolio to the method.
Emergency and urgent MH liaison targets. You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please be clear which article you are requesting.
IHealth Education England (HEE) has worked with Public Concern at Work and the National Guardian Office to develop a package of online learning resources that aim to encourage and support NHS staff to raise and respond to concerns.
Available on HEE’s e-Learning for Healthcare (e-LfH) website, two e-learning sessions promote relevant policies, procedures, best practice and available support in relation to raising and responding to concerns.
NHS investigations and reporting of deaths (leading on from Southern Health issues). You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please be clear which article you are requesting.
Prior literature identified the use of Performance Measurement Systems (PMS) as crucial in addressing improved processes of care. Moreover, a strategic use of PMS has been found to enhance quality, compared to non-strategic use, although a clear understanding of this linkage is still to be achieved. This paper deals with the test of direct and indirect models related to the link between the strategic use of PMS and the level of improved processes in health care organizations. Indirect models were mediated by the degree of perceived managerial discretion.
This report describes the quality improvement journey of three mental health organisations (two in England and one in Singapore). It provides key insights and lessons for others considering embarking on a similar journey.
Read our new briefing to help you understand more about how involving staff with quality improvement initiatives, can have a significant impact on your staff engagement levels.
The cause of adverse weekend clinical outcomes remains unknown. In 2013, the “NHS Services, Seven Days a Week” project was initiated to improve access to services across the seven-day week. Three years on, we sought to analyse the impact of such changes across the English NHS.
In Central and North West London NHS Foundation Trust we have been working over the past six months to embed outcome measurement in routine practice through the Psychological Medicine Clinical Network. Eight of our liaison mental health departments meet regularly to share ideas and learn from each other’s successes and failures. From this we’re identifying the factors needed to support effective use of the FROM-LP, and the benefits this kind of information can bring both to our patients and our services.
We are delighted to report that the latest inspection report on our Trust from the Care Quality Commission (CQC), the independent regulator of health and social care in England, has rated us as Good overall.
Four months ago a team from the CQC visited us to carry out an inspection. During the announced inspection in November 2016, the CQC team visited 28 wards, teams and clinics and spoke to staff, service users, relatives and carers, attended meetings and joined care professionals for home visits and clinic appointments.
Drug name confusion is a common type of medication error and a persistent threat to patient safety. In the USA, roughly one per thousand prescriptions results in the wrong drug being filled, and most of these errors involve drug names that look or sound alike. Prior to approval, drug names undergo a variety of tests to assess their potential for confusability, but none of these preapproval tests has been shown to predict real-world error rates.
Objectives We conducted a study to assess the association between error rates in laboratory-based tests of drug name memory and perception and real-world drug name confusion error rates. Login at top right hand side of page using your SSSFT NHS Athens for full text. SSOTP - You can request a copy of this article by replying to this email. Please ensure you are clear which article you are requesting.
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has found that the services provided by Kent and Medway NHS and Social Care Partnership Trust have improved following the latest inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
Two years ago, CQC rated the trust as Requires Improvement after inspectors identified significant variation in the quality of its services.
As a result of the latest inspection in January 2017, the trust has been rated as Good overall, and Outstanding for being caring. Safety is rated Requires Improvement.
South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust’s rating upgraded to Good as services to patients improve
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has upgraded the overall rating of South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust from Requires Improvement to Good following an inspection earlier this year.
During this inspection, the team looked areas where the trust had been told they must improve during a comprehensive inspection in March 2016.
We’ve just heard that SSOTP will not be renewing their agreement with SSSFT LKS for library services for this financial year. Because of this we will be reviewing our Be Aware bulletins. Sadly we won’t be accepting any new sign-ups from SSOTP staff and will be withdrawing some of the physical healthcare bulletins that we…
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.
Healthcare-associated infections, particularly ones caused by antibiotic-resistant bacteria, are associated with high morbidity, mortality and economic costs. In the USA, on average, 2 out of 10 patients admitted to a hospital contract a healthcare-associated infection and their mortality is estimated to exceed breast and prostate cancers, combined.1 Antibiotic-resistant pathogens are responsible for more than two million infections and 23 000 deaths each year in the USA, at a direct cost of $20 billion and additional productivity losses of $35 billion.2 In the European Union, an estimated 37 000 deaths are attributable to antibiotic-resistant infections, costing €1.5 billion annually in direct and indirect costs.3 To read the full article, log in using your NHS OpenAthens details.
Most recently, we were asked if we would like to take part in a pilot inspection to test the CQC’s plans to work more closely together through the lens of their new ‘well-led’ framework. This was a fantastic opportunity to work collaboratively with them to shape the way in which they monitor, inspect and regulate services. It was also a chance to receive some valuable feedback on the strength and effectiveness of our governance processes and leadership.
We were one of just four trusts nationally – and the only mental health and community trust – to take part in the pilot. After the visit, I am delighted to say that the CQC commended our commitment to person-centredness and co-production, our nursing associate roles, and our governance processes in relation to serious incidents and complaints.
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has rated the community mental health services for people with a learning disability provided by Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust as Outstanding following an inspection in April this year.
The government needs to take a stronger and more integrated approach if it is to rein in the increasing cost of clinical negligence claims across the health and justice systems, according to the National Audit Office.
“We welcomed publication of the new single oversight framework (SOF) last month as offering a more coordinated approach to measuring NHS providers' performance and targeting the improvement support they need.
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.
Our review of the way NHS trusts review and investigate deaths has found that opportunities to learn from patient deaths are being missed – and too many families are not being included or listened to when an investigation takes place.
Vulnerable older people should be offered befriending programmes or exercise classes to prevent loneliness.
In a new quality standard NICE urges councils, housing organisations and the voluntary sector to work together to identify vulnerable older people.
Those most at risk should be directed to dancing or swimming clubs; arts groups or singing programmes or helping with reading in schools; as well as volunteering and befriending programmes
This quality standard covers all young people (aged up to 25) using children’s health and social care services who are due to make the transition to adults’ services. It includes young people:
with mental health problems
with disabilities
with long-term, life-limiting or complex needs
in secure settings
under the care of local authorities.
The Care Quality Commission has told West London Mental Health NHS Trust that it must make significant improvements in the care of patients at Broadmoor Hospital in Berkshire.
CQC has issued a Warning Notice requiring the trust to improve care at the high security psychiatric hospital.
Inspectors visited Broadmoor in November 2016 to check the trust’s progress in meeting requirements that had been identified on a previous inspection. On the latest inspection, CQC found that the trust still did not have enough suitably qualified staff deployed to meet the needs of patients.
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.
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.
The short anonymised stories illustrate the profound impact that failures in public services can have on the lives of individuals and their families. Most of the summaries we are publishing are cases we have upheld or partly upheld. These are the cases which provide clear and valuable lessons for public services by showing what needs changing so that similar mistakes can be avoided in future. They include complaints about failures to spot serious illnesses and mistakes by government departments that caused financial hardship. Examples include SaTH and SSOTP, and several examples from mental health
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.
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?
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.
PLACE stands for Patient Led Assessment of the Care Environment. A PLACE Assessment focuses entirely on the care environment and does not assess clinical care provision.
There are four areas that are assessed: access to privacy for patients and respect for their dignity, food and hydration, cleanliness, and general building condition and maintenance. Assessment teams are made up of 50% staff and 50% service users.
Each year, the PLACE inspection team visits all of our inpatient wards, making sure that Greater Manchester West is providing the best environments for its service users. The team looks at a variety of standards such as cleanliness, quality of the food, privacy and dignity and the buildings general condition and maintenance.
The inspection team is made up of GMW staff and service users.
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.
There are aspects of the patient experience that are so important to patients and service users and carers that providers should aim to perform them consistently for every individual, every time. This is the definition of an Always Event. A fundamental principle of Always Events is that they are co-produced with patients and service users and staff. NHS England is working with the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) and Picker Institute Europe to spread the use of Always Events throughout the NHS.
Occupational Therapists (OT) in Lincolnshire have been working hard on a number of electronic evidence based pathways.
The pathways are an easy reference guide to expected practice and links to information and tools required for working with patients on this aspect of their care.
This ensures that OTs are using evidence based practice and consistent tools across mental health services in Lincolnshire and is a really useful guide for new staff and students.
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.
This Future Hospital Programme case study comes from Withybush Hospital. It lays out the process for initiating an organised quality improvement project run by trainees, with the coordination of a lead doctor.
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?
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.
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).
In March we were visited by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) who inspected our services. They have now published their reports. We welcome this independent view of our services as an opportunity to continue improving our services for local people.
Without exception, all of our services were found to be caring and the reports highlight how our staff treat people with kindness, care and compassion. Across our 14 service line reports, more than 70% of the individual ratings are ‘Good’ (green).
Draft guidance from NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) outlines what the best palliative care for children looks like.
It emphasises the need for infants, children and young people to be treated as individuals and highlights the importance of children and their families being involved in decisions about care.
Below are some of the timeless instructions on how to be a terrible employee. What’s most amusing is that despite the dry language and specificity of the context, the productivity-crushing activities recommended are all-too-common behaviors in many organizations.
The Health and Social Care Committee hears from the Chair, Chief Executive and Chief Inspectors of the Care Quality Commission on the State of Care Report.
Open access. We evaluated the introduction of a predictive risk stratification model (PRISM) into primary care. Contemporaneously National Health Service (NHS) Wales introduced Quality and Outcomes Framework payments to general practices to focus care on those at highest risk of emergency admission to hospital. The aim of this study was to evaluate the costs and effects of introducing PRISM into primary care.
The South London and Maudsley (SLaM) NHS Foundation Trust has been rated Good overall by the Care Quality Commission.
SLaM was rated Good for being effective, caring, responsive and well-led. It was rated Requires Improvement for being safe, following the inspection in July and August 2018.
England’s Chief Inspector of Hospitals has rated the services provided by Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust as Good following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission.
Open access. To explore how the South-West Foundation Doctor Quality Improvement programme affected foundation year 1 (F1) doctors’ attitudes and ability to implement change in healthcare.
P. Adamopoulos. ICIS, Association for Information Systems, (2013)The findings of our analysis illustrate that Professor(s) is the most important factor in online course retention and has the largest positive effect on the probability of a student to successfully complete a course. The sentiment of students for Assignments and Course Material also has positive effects on the successful completeness of a course whereas the Discussion Forum has a positive effect on the probability to partially complete a course. Furthermore, self-paced courses have a negative effect, compared to courses that follow a specific timetable. In addition, the difficulty, the workload, and the duration of a course have a negative effect. On the other hand, for the more difficult courses, self-paced timetable, longer duration in weeks, and more workload have a positive effect on the probability to successfully complete a course. Besides, final exams and projects, open textbooks, and peer assessment have also positive effects. Moreover, whether a certificate is awarded upon the successful completion of a course also affects retention. Additionally, the better a university is considered (i.e. higher ranking), the more likely that a student will successfully complete a course. Further, our results illustrate that the courses which belong to the academic disciplines of Business and Management, Computer Science, and Science have a positive significant effect in contrast to courses in other disciplines (i.e. Engineering, Humanities, and Mathematics). Finally, attrition was not found to be related with student characteristics (i.e. gender, formal education)..