What is Quality Governance and why is it important?
Quality governance is a system through which NHS organisations are accountable for maintaining and improving their quality of care and services. For it to be successful our staff must understand their roles and objectives and be trained to provide the care we aspire to.
NHS England / Improvement defines quality governance as ‘…the combination of structures and processes at and below board level to lead to trust-wide quality performance including:
• Ensuring required standards are achieved
• Investigating and taking action on sub-standard performance
• Planning and driving continuous improvement
• Identifying, sharing and ensuring delivery of best-practice
• Identifying and managing risks to the quality of care’
How do we do this?
By having systems and processes in place in which staff are trained to:
• Ask the right questions to understand the quality of care we provide;
• Make sure we are doing the right things to maintain and improve it; and
• Ensure that our patients get safe, clinically effective, caring and responsive care, every time.
Why do we need it?
Because our patients expect and deserve our very best efforts, without fail, to provide great care for them. If we do not take time to ask the right questions, to do the right things, and to check that we are providing great care we will fall short of the care they expect and that we want to deliver. We need to have transparent systems and properly trained staff to demonstrate the quality of care we give.
The Trust is committed to the establishment of a supportive, open and learning culture that encourages staff to report incidents and near misses through the appropriate channels. The aim is not to apportion blame but rather to learn from incidents and near misses and improve practice accordingly. All staff within the Trust have a responsibility to ensure that they report any incident or near misses they have been involved in or witnessed.
The Patient Safety Incident Response Framework Policy sets out how the Trust will approach this, while the Incident Reporting and Management SOP sets out how to do this in more detail.
The Trust aims to take all reasonable steps in the management of risk with the overall objective of protecting patients, staff and assets. A primary concern is the provision of safer, risk-free environments together with working policies and practices, which take into account assessed risks.
The Trust recognises that risk management forms an integral part of its philosophy, practices and its business planning cycle. The purpose of this guide is to describe in detail the processes needed to ensure appropriate management of risk within the Trust. It describes the framework and the methods that the Trust will use to identify, manage and reduce risks (actual or potential) which exist within the organisation and its environment.
