Patient safety and quality

Transforming care and driving continuous improvement in quality and safety helps us ensure that we can develop services that help people get better quickly in a clinically safe environment.

Friends and Family Test

It is important that we listen, understand and respond where necessary to the views and concerns of our patients. As part of this commitment we have supported the roll out of the Friends and Family Test within secondary care and are working with our member practices to support them so that they are ready to run the Friends and Family Test within their practices.

Patient Insight Group

Patient experience information and proposed actions for change are reviewed and monitored by the CCG’s Patient Insight Group, which has oversight of all of the patient experience information received. Data is compared over time, including information gathered by the Patient Advice and Liaison Service (PALS), complaints, and comments made online including websites such as Patient Opinion and NHS Choices.

We have developed a number of mechanisms for collecting and collating patient experience information, including:

• CCG surveys – the CCG has commissioned and undertaken a number of surveys, including the experience of older people in hospital, and the experiences of patients in general.
• Social media – the CCG has a Twitter and Facebook accounts where people can offer opinions comments on their experiences, and we also encourage online feedback through our website.
• National and local surveys – hospitals are required to partake in a number of annual patient experience surveys and all providers are also required to submit regular patient experience reports to the CCG based on their own patient experience work and findings. We also support and promote national surveys such as the patient survey for GP practices.

We have established a number of patient involvement groups including an insight group that helps us to monitor feedback from a range of sources.

Quality Framework

One of the CCG’s key responsibilities is to make sure that the services that we commission are of the highest quality. We have a team of managers with a clinical background, who are responsible for monitoring and seeking assurance of standards of quality from all of our providers. This short animations describes how we do this:

A summary of how we monitor quality and the framework through which we enact, can be found in this document.

The framework and process by which we monitor quality, and how we respond when there are concerns about quality of services can be found in this document.