A new set of standards has been introduced to ensure patients receive consistently high levels of care during a stay at St Mary’s Hospital.
The Clinical Quality Standards have been developed by local nurses, health care assistants and patient representatives and cover areas such as personal hygiene, infection prevention and control, nutrition and hydration, privacy and dignity, communications and end of life care.
Each quality standard has a clear set of actions to be taken by ward staff to ensure excellent patient care is being consistently given.
Judy Dyos, Deputy Director of Nursing has led the development of the standards. Judy said:
“Quality standards are important as they enable us to work together to improve the quality of care we are providing and ensure it is the best care we can possibly give to each and every patient. The standards are helping us to measure how we are doing, highlight the areas that we are improving but also flagging up where we need to do more and better.
“The driving force for this work is our commitment to provide the best possible clinical care to all our patients at a level that should ‘always happen’.
The Quality Standards form part of the “15 steps” Challenge which focuses on seeing care through a patient or carer’s eyes, and exploring their first impressions. The assessment is carried every second week of the month in 2 to 3 hospital wards at a time and looks at whether each ward is welcoming, safe, caring, well organised and calm.
Judy continued:
“The standards have been developed together with staff and patients as well as taking into consideration important national guidelines and standards set by the care Quality Commission (CQC). They are areas which are important to our patients but also to us, as healthcare professionals, and they will help us to continue to improve the care we give across all of our services.”
In addition to the 15 Steps Challenge, the Quality Standards will be achieved and maintained through continuous monitoring by clinical staff working at ward and management level through daily assessments and audits, direct feedback from patients and through patient surveys.
The Clinical Quality Standards for Community services are due to be launched in July with standards for Mental Health currently being developed.
The Clinical Quality Standards document is available to download here.
I know this may have been said MANY times before, but…
Surely the whole raison d’etre of the NHS when it was founded was care “from cradle to grave”.
The service is constantly claimed to be under-funded, and yet, it would appear that monies can be found to be spend on ‘new systems’ to ensure that ‘the very best care’ is provided to patients!!!
It has been said before, and I will repeat it again here – GET RID OF GREAT LAYERS OF (so called) MANAGEMENT and ‘ADMIN’ staff – better utilise the funds that there are for their intended purpose of actually carding for people and not paying Pen Pushers to come up with alternative systems for care, wasting vast sums of public money in the process.
Oh yes, there is the answer -Public Money. Because it is basically unaccountable, ie, it does not come out of their own pockets, there is a total lack of responsibility in ensuring money is spent wisely!
Join the discussion…Do you actually know how the NHS works? or is this just information you have taken from the newspapers, so we get rid of the great layers of management and admin staff (so called) and who then carries out the work they do, maybe you think doctors and nurses should do all the work, also the last time I checked all NHS staff paid tax so public money does come out their own pocket, or maybe NHS staff pay a special kind of tax that doesn’t go to the public accounts department. the NHS don’t claim to be under funded it is underfunded.