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Showing results for tags 'Quality improvement'.
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Content Article
RCOG: National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA)
PatientSafetyLearning Team posted an article in Maternity
The National Maternity and Perinatal Audit (NMPA) is a large scale audit of the NHS maternity services across England, Scotland and Wales undertaken by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG). Using timely high-quality data, the audit aims to evaluate a range of care processes and outcomes, in order to identify good practice and areas for improvement in the care of women and babies looked after by NHS maternity services. -
Content ArticleIn the past 10 years, rates of Obstetric Anal Sphincter Injury (OASI) have increased in England. Experiences in some maternity units have shown that some of the underlying problems related to this rise in OASI include:Inconsistencies in approaches to preventing OASIsInconsistencies in training and skillsLack of awareness of risk factors and long-term impact of OASIsVariation in practice between health professionalsIn light of this, the OASI care bundle team have developed and piloted an intervention package, including a care bundle and guide, a multidisciplinary skills development module for health care professionals, and campaign materials (such as leaflets and newsletters designed to raise awareness).This scaling up programme is a collaboration between the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG), Croydon Health Services NHS Trust, the Royal College of Midwives (RCM) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), with funding provided by The Health Foundation.
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Content ArticleIn this report, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) explain the information they have gathered on the pressures that services and local systems have faced during COVID-19 and the efforts that have been made to tackle them. These insight reports are designed to help everyone involved in health and social care to work together to learn from the first stages of the COVID-19 pandemic by: sharing and reflecting on what has gone well understanding and learning from the experience of what hasn't helping health and care systems prepare better in the future. This issue is divided into three main chapters: Working together across systems Focus on primary care How the care for people from different groups is being managed.
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Content ArticleUniversity Hospitals of Morecambe Bay NHS Foundation Trust (UHMBT) is setting out its priorities for the remainder of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic and into the future. The pandemic has meant that certain plans have had to be put temporarily on hold but the Trust says there are important areas that can and will be developed over the next few months and into 2021. Quality and safety of care remain the main priorities so the Trust is now focusing on four key areas to ensure that services recover and improve as the country emerges from the pandemic.
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Content ArticleThe current COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated the redeployment of NHS staff to acute-facing specialties, meaning that care of dying people is being provided by those who may not have much experience in this area. This report published by Future Healthcare Journal, details how a plan, do, study, act (PDSA) approach was taken to implementing improved, standardised multidisciplinary documentation of individualised care and review for people who are in the last hours or days of life, both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. The documentation and training produced is subject to ongoing review via the specialist palliative care team's continuously updated hospital deaths dashboard, which evaluates the care of patients who have died in the trust. It is hoped that sharing the experiences and outcomes of this process will help other trusts to develop their own pathways and improve the care of dying people through this difficult time and beyond.
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Content ArticleIn this blog, Suzanne Rastrick, Chief Allied Health Professions Officer for NHS England, urges colleagues to start describing service improvements they are undertaking as part of the COVID response and considering what evidence they may need to create a case to continue the good practice. She asks 'what could we be doing now to measure impact and are we capturing data already that could be developed or utilised to demonstrate and evidence the improvements created through changes in working practices?'
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Content ArticleThis study, published in Health Services and Delivery Research, found the patient experience feedback cycle was rarely completed, and despite diverse approaches to gathering feedback in inpatient settings, approaches to analysing and using this information remain underdeveloped.
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Content Article
We all want a culture of speaking up, don’t we? So, why isn’t it happening?
Anonymous posted an article in Bullying and fear
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Effective speaking up arrangements protect patients and improve the experience of NHS workers. The guidance set out by Sir Robert Francis in his Freedom to Speak Up review, was to develop a more open and supportive culture that encourages staff to speak up about any issues of patient care, quality or safety. In this blog I want to explore why this hasn’t been happening in Trusts up and down the country, despite everyone wanting a safe culture to speak up, no more so than myself, a clinician who has a keen interest in patient and staff safety. Sir Robert Francis laid out six principles for Trusts to follow in his review of speaking up in NHS Trusts in 2015. I would like to reflect on the times when I have spoken up about patient safety issues and the responses I have had when I have raised them. I will use Francis’ six principles to frame the blog.- Posted
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Content ArticleThe paper is a SWOT* analysis of regulation and accreditation as tools for excellence, also known as safer healthcare. Solutions for structure and process are suggested for desired outcomes. SWOT = Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats
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Content ArticleThis is a comprehensive collection of proven quality, service improvement and redesign tools, theories and techniques that can be applied to a wide variety of situations. You can search the collection alphabetically for a specific tool or browse groups of tools using one of four categories.
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Content ArticleChange is at the heart of quality improvement in healthcare. As the needs of populations continually fluctuate, healthcare must evolve to reflect and serve those needs. The overarching theme of the 2018 ISQua conference, hosted in Kuala Lumpur, was ‘Heads, hearts and hands weaving the fabric of quality and safety’, which led many speakers to examine change in quality and safety improvement through the lens of these three central elements. Collectively, the conference presentations formed a picture of the global landscape of quality and safety in healthcare and offered many valuable examples of innovation that can facilitate sustainable change. Identifying areas for transformation and implementing change can be relatively straightforward, but lasting change is much more challenging to realise. This topic was widely discussed, with many speakers sharing their experiences and learning on embedding lasting change through organisational culture. It is evident that investing time and resources to engage those on the frontline of healthcare delivery can have a huge impact on quality improvement.
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Content ArticleHealth systems throughout the world are now more focused on creating a more patient-centred approach to healthcare, ensuring the voice of the patient is heard through every level of the system. This focus on the patient is driven by a desire to improve quality of care as the two are inevitably linked. However, some countries are struggling to change systems which take a traditional approach based on a patient’s clinical presentation of signs and symptoms, followed with a management plan and medical treatment. This report highlights many ways in which we can give patients more say in the decisions about their treatment and care. It draws on keynote presentations and seminars from ISQua 2017 – a world-leading conference on quality improvement.
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Content ArticleAs we look to the future, the healthcare industry is at a critical juncture. The rapid development of theories on how to deliver safe, person-centred care means that we can no longer rely on the excuse that “healthcare is different” from other industries and cannot be reliable and safe. People are now demanding safety and reliability in the care they receive, and they want to be treated as people who happen to be ill rather than as a number or a disease. Currently, it is by chance rather than by design that one receives highly reliable person-centred and safe care. Yet we continue to build the same type of hospitals, educate future nurses and clinicians as we have always done and operate in a hierarchical system that disempowers people, rather than enables people to be healthy. Although the provision of healthcare is complex, it is possible to overcome the complexity and provide care that is of the highest standard in all the domains of quality. To achieve this, Peter Lachman in his blog suggests six steps to be considered.
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Content ArticlePatient and family advisory councils (PFAC) are groups of patients, family members, community members, and hospital staff who work together to bring the unique perspectives of patients and families to a hospital’s operations, especially its efforts to improve care. According to one estimate, more than 2,000 hospitals in the United States have PFACs. They are also slowly becoming more common in outpatient settings. Massachusetts is the only state that mandates all hospitals (acute care, rehabilitation, and long-term acute care) to have a PFAC. Five years on, this is a review of how the mandate came about, how the implementation process has gone, what PFACs in Massachusetts are doing now and what other states, healthcare organisations and consumer advocacy groups can learn from the Massachusetts experience.
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Content ArticleSafety and improvement efforts in healthcare education and practice are often limited by inadequate attention to human factors/ergonomics (HFE) principles and methods. Integration of HFE theory and approaches within undergraduate curricula, postgraduate training and healthcare improvement programmes will enhance both the performance of care systems (productivity, safety, efficiency, quality) and the well-being (experiences, joy, satisfaction, health and safety) of all the people (patients, staff, visitors) interacting with these systems. Patient safety and quality improvement education/training are embedded to some extent in most curricula, providing a potential conduit to integrate HFE concepts. To support this, Bowie et al. in this article published in Medical Teacher offer professional guidance as “tips” for educators on fundamental HFE systems and design approaches. The goal is to further enhance the effectiveness of safety and improvement work in frontline healthcare practice.
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Content ArticleOrganisations around the world are using 'Lean' to redesign care and improve processes in a way that achieves and sustains meaningful results for patients, staff, physicians, and health systems. Lean Hospitals, Third Edition explains how to use the Lean methodology and mindsets to improve safety, quality, access, and morale while reducing costs, increasing capacity, and strengthening the long-term bottom line. This updated edition of a Shingo Research Award recipient begins with an overview of Lean methods. It explains how Lean practices can help reduce various frustrations for caregivers, prevent delays and harm for patients and improve the long-term health of your organisation.
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Content ArticlePositive Psychology studies how people are able to perform extraordinarily well in challenging situations. After a dozen years of research in prestigious medical centres, an evidence-based method for applying this science has been developed. That six step program is PROPEL.
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Content ArticlePatient Safety Learning has submitted the attached response to the consultation for the national patient safety syllabus. The NHS Patient Safety Strategy, published in June 2019, sets out three strategic aims around Insight, Involvement and Improvement which will enable it to achieve its safety vision. It defines the Involvement aim as ‘equipping patients, staff and partners with the skills and opportunities to improve patient safety throughout the whole system’. A key action associated with this aim is the creation of a system-wide patient safety syllabus which is capable of ‘producing the best informed and safety-focused workforce in the world’. The Academy of Medical Royal Colleges (AOMRC) has been commissioned by Health Education England (HEE) to develop a new National patient safety syllabus. The Academy has now published its first version of this for review and feedback. At Patient Safety Learning, we’ve been working with the AOMRC and HEE in the initial stage of development to share our thoughts on the initial proposals in this syllabus. Now that this has been formally published for consultation, we want to share our submission as part of the consultation process which closed on Friday 28 February 2020. We welcome the development of a National patient safety syllabus and believe that it’s very important that this acts as a key driver for achieving a step change in patient safety across the NHS. In our response to the consultation we identify several areas where there are significant gaps in the initial draft that need to be addressed and comment on the development process of the syllabus, inviting a more inclusive and transparent process that enables a wide range of stakeholders to engage and contribute.
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Content ArticleIn his presentation to the City Club of Cleveland, renowned patient safety expert, Dr Peter Pronovost talks about why we must transform healthcare to reduce harm, to operate as an effective system for patient benefit and eliminate inefficiencies. Peter describes the power of stories for learning and how we can create moments of microtrust that will inspire and give us confidence to change.
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Content ArticleI-Hydrate was a collaborative research project, which used service improvement methodology, and was undertaken at two privately operated North West London care homes in partnership with care home staff, residents and their carers and families. I-Hydrate aimed to optimise the hydration of residents in nursing homes, improve the quality and safety of care and decrease dehydration and the morbidity associated with it.
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Content ArticleAnna Erhard, Quality and Outcomes Manager at the Schoen Clinic, presented at the recent Bevan Brittan Patient Safety Seminar. Attached are the presentation slides.
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Content ArticleThe PRAISe project tests the hypothesis that, together, positive reporting and appreciative inquiry can be used as an intervention to facilitate behavioural change and improvement in the related areas of sepsis management and antimicrobial stewardship.
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Content ArticleThis paper, published by BMJ Quality & Safety, looks at the global rise in patient complaints which has been accompanied by growing research to effectively analyse complaints for safer, more patient-centric care. Most patients and families complain to improve the quality of healthcare, yet progress has been complicated by a system primarily designed for case-by-case complaint handling. If healthcare settings are better supported to report, analyse and use complaints data in a standardised manner, complaints could impact on care quality in important ways. This review has established a range of evidence-based, short-term recommendations to achieve this.
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Content Article
Why do we need to talk about patient data?
Claire Cox posted an article in Actions in response to data
This short video, by Understanding Patient Data, shows people talking about why it's important to use patient data, and why we need to better explain the benefits and safeguards. -
Content ArticleThis white paper explores the significance of safety strategies in healthcare settings and how these practices influence the patient and clinician experience. The Experience of Safety in Healthcare: A Call to Expand Perceptions and Solutions, reflects on the integrated nature of safety and service and how they interact to create the overall experience of patients, families and clinicians.
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