Issue - meetings

Members of the Committee may be aware of the requirement that all providers of NHS services publish Quality Accounts – annual reports to the public on the quality of healthcare they deliver.

Providers have to share their Quality Accounts prior to publication in June with their commissioning Primary Care Trust (or Strategic Health Authority), the relevant Overview and Scrutiny Committee (OSC) and the Local Involvement Network (LINk).  The OSC and the LINk will have the opportunity to comment on the Quality Account on a voluntary basis.

Ursula Martin will brief the Committee on the preparation of the Quality Account for CWP.

Ursula Martin, Associate Director Quality, Compliance and Assurance, briefed the Committee on the process for submitting a Quality Account for Cheshire and Wirral Partnership NHS Foundation Trust (CWP).  

All providers of NHS services were required to publish Quality Accounts – annual reports to the public on the quality of healthcare that they delivered.  Prior to publication of the finalised Quality Account in June, providers were required to share their draft Account with the commissioning Primary Care Trust (or Strategic Health Authority), the Overview and Scrutiny Committee (OSC) and the Local Involvement Network (LINk).

Ursula Martin explained that part of the process of producing a Quality Account involved identifying Priorities for Improvement which had to include at least one priority relating to each of the following categories – Safety, Clinical Effectiveness and Patient Experience.  CWP had identified:

      Under the Safety Priority- 2 priorities relating to monitoring trends from Serious Untoward Incident investigations and reducing preventable falls in inpatient areas;

      Under the Effectiveness Priority – 3 priorities were identified relating to implementing the Advancing Quality programme for schizophrenia and dementia; developing systems to help identify adherence to National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance as part of an electronic care pathway and reviewing physical health for those with a mental illness;

      Under the Patient Experience – collecting real time patient experience data and ensure that patient experience of previous Assertive Outreach service users and carers is sought and continuously monitored during the merge of this function into Community Mental Health Teams.

CWP had reviewed the quality of its past performance and could demonstrate improvements in a number of areas including:

• Improved learning from patient safety incidents by increasing reporting by 3.1% - this upward trend was encouraging and in line with best practice which suggested that organisations where incident reporting by staff was high (incidents that were of low or no harm), were safer;
• Strengthen hand decontamination compliance – almost 2500 staff had attended hand decontamination training and audits had been carried out to measure compliance;
• Increase offer of psychological intervention to service users with schizophrenia – the target was 70% and a rate of 68% had been achieved;
• Diagnosis of dementia by a specialist – almost 95% of service users referred to the Trust were diagnosed and assessed within 13 weeks;
• Increased patient experience feedback – a target of 5% had been surpassed with patients’ experience through comments, compliments, concerns and complaints increasing by over 7%.

CWP was also regulated by Monitor and the Care Quality Commission.  The draft Quality Account would be submitted to a Special meeting of the Committee for consideration and comment prior to publication in June 2010.

RESOLVED:  that the process of producing a Quality Account be noted and the CWP draft Quality Account be considered at a Special meeting of the Committee on Tuesday 25 May.