Clinical Systems Improvement
The NHS institute has many tools to help you to bring about clinical systems improvement. Here are a selection of them:
Protocol Based Care
This tool addresses the key questions of what should be done, when, where and by whom, and provides a framework for working in multi-disciplinary teams. Standardising practice reduces variation in the treatment of patients and improves the quality of care.
Clinical Engagement
Clinicians and managers may take different approaches to improvement, but they are both integral to achieving successful change. These tools will help when considering clinical engagement: Stakeholder analysis; Bullet proofing; Addressing uncertainty; The art of listening.
Clinically Prioritise and Treat (CPaT)
This tool looks at variations in waiting time between the original decision to admit (ODTA) and the date of admission for treatment. You can then use the CPaT toolkit to promote discussion pinpointing the cause of variation in waiting times at trust, site, speciality, sub-speciality and procedure level.
Achieving exceptional patient care
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement has published a new white paper, Achieving an Exceptional Patient and Family Experience of Inpatient Hospital Care, which presents a framework centred on five primary drivers of an exceptional experience of care that hospitals can use to design, test, and implement changes, weaving them into the fabric of daily work to achieve outstanding results.
Also see the:
IHI Improvement Map
Patient- and Family-Centered Care Organizational Self-Assessment Tool
Partnering with Patients and Families to Design a Patient- and Family-Centered Health Care System: Recommendations and Promising Practices
You may also be interested in the NHS Confederation’s, Delivering excellent patient experience website and its Feeling Better? Improving Patient Experience in Hospital report.
eQIPP website
NHS Improvement’s website dedicated to QIPP. Featured this month: Stroke
Read February’s Stroke Improvement bulletin.
STROKE - ACT F.A.S.T. Campaign
Telemedicine: Improving access and outcomes for acute stroke patients and expanding opportunities along the pathway
Atrial Fibrillation and the lessons learned by cardiac and stroke networks - looks at lessons learned by cardiac and stroke networks in NHS Improvement pilots.
Quality and Productivity Cochrane Topics/Case Studies
NHS Evidence has published some case studies of innovative practices so that organisations can learn from one another. Also the Cochrane Topics section has some ‘implications for practice’ to help inform local practices. Recent additions include:
Centralised Nurse-led Vascular Access Team within Radiology
Medicines management assistants: to reduce medicine wastage
Rapid Response Services: intermediate tier, multi-disciplinary health and social care service
Chronic kidney disease: electronic consultation
Musculoskeletal physiotherapy: patient self-referral
Low risk upper gastrointestinal bleeding: avoiding patient admissions
This month’s tool: Root Cause Analysis (RCA)
Root Cause Analysis is a quality improvement tool to help determine the contributing factors and subsequently, root causes that led to an event or critical incident.
See the NHS Institute’s tool Root Cause Analysis and the Five Whys, and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Systems Analysis of Clinical Incidents: The London Protocol.
The NPSA and the CPSI both have a set of tools to enable you to perform root cause analyses.
This bulletin is brought to you by Library and Knowledge Services. It aims to keep you up-to-date with clinical governance issues. At the beginning of each month, a librarian will update the bulletin with relevant information published in the preceding month. If there are areas you think we also need to cover, please let us know.