Making clinical strides: a thank you for the past 12 months

Colleagues have been thanked for their contribution to improving clinical care, as the latest Quality Account is published.

Under NHS regulations, all organisations publish quality accounts about clinical priorities for the coming year and reflect on the past 12 months.

In 2015/16, despite receiving more than a million 999 calls for the first time ever (and taking more than half a million patients into hospital), we’ve still made some great strides in clinical improvements:

• We exceeded our care-bundle targets for heart attack (STEMI) and stroke care
• We improved our recognition of sepsis on the previous year
• We were above the national average for ambulance services for febrile convulsions, mental health (self-harm), and asthma care
• We launched a quality and safety strategy, to make sure we’re putting patient safety and clinical effectiveness at the heart of everything we do, and improving in these areas
• We received 1,761 compliments about you and the care you gave to patients – that’s an average of 147 a month.

Tracy Nicholls, Head of Clinical Quality, said: “I am exceptionally proud of what has been achieved clinically this year, and want to thank our clinical, operations and patient-facing teams for the huge part they’ve played in what we know has been a very difficult 12 months.

“You’ve remained passionate, patient-focused, clinically-driven, and committed – and that makes a real difference to the lives of our patients. Please keep up the great work and focus that I know you all have; I look forward to seeing what we’ll achieve this year - onwards and upwards!”

So what about this year?

For 2015/16, and following your feedback, we’re focusing on key areas like stroke and heart attack care, timely responses to patients, sepsis recognition, improving experience for dementia patients, and ensuring we learn from and provide feedback after serious incidents.

There are broken up into three ‘priority areas’:

• Patient safety, which includes things like: making sure we complete actions and learning that come from serious incident (SI) investigations; fully embedding Duty of Candour; and ensuring that if you report an incident on Datix, you get good quality feedback on what’s happened as a result 

• Clinical effectiveness, which includes: improving our recognition of sepsis, and delivering the sepsis care bundle to these patients; implementing an end-of-life care strategy, to improve the care we give to these people 

• Patient experience, which largely focuses around our mental health care for dementia patients: we’ll be using patient satisfaction surveys to see what these patients, and their families, think of the care we provide (and if we could do anything better), and will work in partnership with other health and social dementia care providers so that patients get a better quality service all round.

These sit alongside performance and clinical indicators that are set for us by the Department of Health, like our response time, STEMI and stroke targets.

Want to know more? You can download a copy of the full Quality Account report from our website.