Assessment for improvement : our approach : have your say / Healthcare Commission.

  • Great Britain. Commission for Healthcare Audit and Inspection
Date:
[2004]
Catalogue details

Licence: Open Government Licence

Credit: Assessment for improvement : our approach : have your say / Healthcare Commission. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    What are the principles of the proposed approach? Our new approach reflects the Government's principles on the inspection of public services. Central to this approach is the need to make assessment less of a burden for those being inspected. Some previous reviews of the NHS’s performance involved large teams of inspectors spending several days on site, and imposed obligations on trusts to collect large volumes of data, occupying teams of their staff - for example, review teams of eight to ten people spending six days inspecting and requiring more than 50 different sets of documents. The new approach will be different. It will not involve large teams of inspectors routinely visiting organisations, and it will not require the large collection of data as a matter of routine. We will make better use of the information readily available to us to target our interventions to where there is cause for concern. Our interventions will be robust where standards are slipping. But, when organisations have demonstrated good performance and effective leadership, our assessments will have a ‘lighter touch’. What will we be assessing? @ e We will assess performance in relation to the Government's standards - common to all healthcare organisations - and to existing and new targets which the NHS is expected to achieve. In 2005/2006, we intend to concentrate on assessing the compliance of NHS organisations with the core standards. But, as public confidence grows that core standards are being met, we will focus more and more on assessments of developmental standards that promote continuous improvement. We have developed draft material on the standards, including prompts which trust boards may wish to consider, and sources of information on performance. This material is ‘work in progress’ that is being developed with the help of patients, clinicians and managers. We recognise that for some types of healthcare services and organisations — for example, mental health, ambulance, learning disability and primary care trusts (including their role in commissioning) - the current standards and targets need to be interpreted in ways that make them specific to the needs of individual organisations, to capture the issues which really matter to them and their patients. We will be discussing with these organisations, and their patients, what more we can do to measure what matters. The assessments that we make of the performance of NHS trusts are designed to help us to answer two questions: is the organisation getting the basics right? is it making and sustaining progress? ; To answer these questions we propose a system of assessment with several components to be assessed and reported on separately. The components will be brought together for each trust’s annual performance rating.