Service Review

Service Reviews for all Sectors of the NHS

The Quality Health Service Review package analyses your services in detail, identifies problems and areas of good practice, and produces a detailed Quality Improvement Plan which enables you to move the service forward.

Each service is different, so each Review must be tailor-made for the reality on the ground. Quality Health develops a Review Brief with you that identifies all the actions to be taken.

These include:

• Identifying the objectives of the Review and potential outcomes.
• Agreeing the time-scale.
• Analysing the caseload data, throughputs, and changes to the pattern of demand and supply.
• Identifying the real queuing arrangements, how many patients are waiting, and for what times.
• Analysing referral patterns.
• Examining the organisation of clinical activity and work.
• Analysing the need for capital equipment and resources.
• Mapping the processes used to deliver the service, including professional, clerical, and management processes.
• Looking at the balance between domiciliary visits and clinic work, where these exist.
• Assessing inter-agency working or inter-professional working where this exists.
• Plotting the impact of regional and national policy guidelines on the needs of particular services.
• Assessing the impact of professional guidelines and practice on service delivery and compliance with good practice.
• Showing how change has to be made to implement National Service Framework guidance.
• Identifying new treatments and needs and identifying how to prioritise them.
• Identifying outcome measures, and Quality Standards and Targets that can be measured.
• In order to deal with these issues, consulting managers, clinicians and staff in an open and structured way to identify facts, and their priorities for change.
• Consulting users where appropriate as part of the review process.

 

Making recommendations on work organisation, resources needed, mix of skills and resources required, and optimum work organisation.

Process and Efficiency Improvements

Many Trusts have already taken action to root out inefficient processes and systems. But many more remain.

Some Trusts have annual deficits - so there is still a mismatch between resources and demand. The answer is to improve the quality of processes and eliminate waste, thus enabling you to re-allocate resources to areas of need.

These improvements can be in the management of services, in administration, in the planning of activity, in day to day implementation, and in the "consumables" that Trusts use extensively: from power through to stocks of domestic and clinical materials.

There is a strong link with the Inspection regime now in place through the CQC . Our process improvement package means that you will be:

• Improving the quality of care for patients.
• Cutting bureaucracy.
• Avoiding expensive litigation and public relations problems.
• Refining your processes.
• Modernising your work, along the lines set by the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement.
• Ensuring that your Clinical Governance Plan is implemented as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Process Improvement works in both clinical and non-clinical areas. What it is not about is individual clinical decision-making.