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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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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J. Hartmann, A. Angeli, and A. Sutcliffe. CHI '08: Proceeding of the twenty-sixth annual SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, (April 2008)