Nursing management (Harrow, London, England : 1994)
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The NHS outcomes framework makes clear that the provision of a 'good experience' of care for patients, alongside clinical effectiveness and safety, is a central goal for the NHS. Developing a comprehensive strategy for measuring patient experience requires a decision about what should be measured and how. This article discusses current policy direction and its implications for practice, and sets out the fundamentals of measuring patient experience.
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Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a significant cause of long-term disability, chronic ill health and mortality, causing about 25,000 deaths a year in hospitals in England. It is recognised as a clinical priority for the NHS by the National Quality Board, which established a VTE board to mainstream and embed VTE prevention in NHS activity by 2012 (Keogh 2011) through the national VTE programme. This article describes NHS East of England's approach to implementing the programme.
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This article outlines work undertaken to relaunch Essence of Care benchmarking at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), a 1,665-bed teaching hospital based on two sites. The eight high impact actions for nurses and midwives (NHS Institute 2009) have been aligned with Essence of Care to develop comprehensive tools for quality improvement at local level. This has resulted in increased patient feedback and enhanced staff ownership and involvement in quality-improvement processes and raising standards of care. As a national pilot site for the Productive Ward programme (NHS Institute 2007), NUH has developed links between the two initiatives, reviewing ward processes, increasing direct patient feedback and providing a wealth of data relating to quality of care and patient-safety issues.
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The Leadership in Compassionate Care programme aims to embed compassionate care in practice and education. This article describes a project within the programme that explores with staff, patients and families the meaning of compassion and how this can be measured. The project has involved developing practice statements from noticing the aspects of compassionate care that work well. Staff were provided with support to consider, develop and implement actions that would help ensure consistency in developing compassionate care.
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Since the publication of a report on learning from adverse events in the NHS a decade ago, healthcare organisations have signed up to programmes to improve safety, investing staff, time and other resources in systems for reporting events and developing processes to ensure better outcomes. This article highlights initiatives that build on this work.