Six areas Healthwatch wants NHS England to focus on in 2018

Using the views you have shared, find out what six areas Healthwatch has told the Government that NHS England should focus on over the next year to improve health and social care for people.

1. Improving public involvement in changes to local services
2. Using people’s experiences of leaving hospital as a way of measuring how well services are working together
3. Demonstrating how learning from feedback is improving care
4. Increasing focus on the evaluation of mental health services
5. Shifting the focus of NHS targets to take greater account of people's experiences
6. Tackling access issues in NHS dentistry

Learning from deaths: case studies from trusts

NHS Improvement has put together a collection of case studies that show the range of activity that trusts are taking to implement the implement the requirements of Learning from Deaths, as well as the challenges they have faced and how they are seeking to overcome these.

Seven day hospital services: challenges and solutions

Learning from other trusts who have identified key challenges in implementing seven-day hospital services.

NHS becomes first healthcare system in the world to publish numbers of avoidable deaths

The NHS will become the first healthcare organisation in the world to publish estimates of how many patients may have died because of problems in their care.

The data will be published each quarter by individual trusts. 171 of the 223 trusts in England have already released or are releasing their first estimates by the end of December.

Each trust will make its own assessment of the number of deaths due to problems in care. The data will not be comparable and will not be collated centrally. This will allow trusts to focus on learning from mistakes and sharing lessons across their organisations and their local healthcare systems.

Transforming Urgent and Emergency Care and the Vanguard Initiative: Learning from Evaluation of the Southern Cluster

Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) vanguards aim to improve the quality, efficiency and effectiveness of UEC services so that patients receive the most appropriate care at the right time and in the right place, and so that unnecessary admissions to accident and emergency (A&E) and hospitals are reduced. The Southern Cluster comprises three such UEC vanguards. RAND Europe's evaluation examined the impacts of the vanguards, the processes underpinning delivery (and associated enablers and challenges), and implications for future policy and practice.

The evaluation used a multi-method approach, including theories of change, document review, workshops, interviews, surveys and data dashboards. Rand's report makes recommendations concerning: (i) UEC health and care workforce capacity-building, (ii) local-national coordination around UEC transformation, (iii) collaboration across localities and professions, (iv) support for an end-to-end UEC pathway with mutually reinforcing activities, (v) cost and outcome data, (vi) an interoperable data infrastructure, and (vii) capacity for evaluation and learning.

Learning from post-accident investigations to ensure patient safety

Jeremy Hunt explains the thinking behind the Health Service Safety Investigations Bill, and recent steps to improve patient safety.

Last week we published the draft Health Service Safety Investigations Bill, which represents a landmark moment for safety and transparency in the NHS, and a victory for the many campaigners who in the wake of the Mid Staffs and Morecambe Bay scandals have called for major change.

The Health Service Safety Investigations Bill aims to take Martin’s insights on post-accident investigations in the transport industry and apply them to healthcare. It will establish, for the first time, a fully independent investigations body responsible for finding answers and embedding new practices across the NHS in the wake of a healthcare error.

Leading large scale change: a practical guide

This guide from NHS England aims to support all those seeking to achieve transformational change in complex health and care environments. The guide has been informed by the learning and lived experience of system leaders who have strived for sustainable transformational change.

Partnerships for improvement: ingredients for success

The idea of partnerships and collaboration across organisational boundaries is at the heart of NHS reforms in England. Although we have helped to develop the evidence base for how networks of people can improve quality of care, less is known about what makes for successful partnerships between providers at an organisational level.

For this reason, the Nuffield Trust commissioned the Health Services Management Centre at the University of Birmingham to look at a range of current organisational partnerships. This report focuses on five different partnering arrangements, as well as interviews with national leaders, and draws learning to help inform and guide policymakers and providers.

Sir John Timpson CBE talks on recruitment, retention and reward

Find out what they do at Timpson to recruit, retain and reward their staff. In this podcast John Timpson talks about the importance of giving autonomy to the frontline, and the value of trust in the workplace. He also shares the lessons he has learned and how they might be relevant to the NHS context.

Developing accountable care systems: lessons from Canterbury, New Zealand

New article published by the King's Fund

There are clear parallels between pressures the Canterbury health system was facing at the start of its programme of transformation and current pressures on the NHS – including financial deficits, rising demand and declining performance in emergency and elective care. Given the positive impact that the changes in Canterbury have had, it is worth considering the lessons that the NHS can learn as it embarks on its own journey of transformation. 

The interventions and delivery models used in Canterbury offer practical lessons for other health systems, as does its approach to change, which includes a strong emphasis on system working, staff engagement, co-design and continuous quality improvement. Technology has been key to Canterbury’s success, and local investment and innovation have been central to this. Developing solutions in partnership with clinical users has been key to their successful design and uptake.

Intermediate Care

This paper, from SCIE, sets out evidence to guide the growth of intermediate care. It looks at why the development of intermediate care requires fresh impetus, sets out learning points that can guide its development and provides case studies covering reablement and bed-based intermediate care.

Implementing the Learning from Deaths framework: key requirements for trust boards

NHS Improvement has published a resource for non-executive directors and non-clinical executive directors explaining how to meet the requirements set out in the National Guidance on Learning from Deaths.

It's also published preventable incidents, survival and mortality (PRISM) materials to help you develop your approach to case record reviews.

How can we assess how well providers review, investigate and learn from deaths?

The CQC would like your views on how we can strengthen the way we look at whether NHS trusts learn from deaths to improve the care they provide.

They'd particularly like to hear from families and carers, but are interested in the views of health professionals too. You can tell them what you think by taking part in our online survey. The survey closes at 6pm on 14 July.

Portrait of a Life: The past, the present, the person

It’s much easier to meet someone’s needs when you know exactly what they are, but if someone has trouble expressing themselves, digging deeper can be difficult.

Portrait of a Life was developed by South West Yorkshire Partnership NHS Foundation Trust as a way of looking into the rich histories of people with dementia in order to offer the most appropriate care which considers their pasts, preferences, and personalities.

It comes as an e-learning package designed to provide people who work in health and care settings – including NHS and care homes – with the skills and knowledge to conduct life story work.

A clinical audit to assess the compliance of documentation of the urinary catheter care bundle in the inpatient units of Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust

From the NICE shared learning database

A clinical audit was undertaken covering the Trust’s inpatient units in order to assess the compliance of staff in the use of documentation for a catheter care bundle for patients with an indwelling catheter in line with the NICE clinical guideline for Healthcare-associated infections: prevention and control in primary and community care (CG139) and the NICE Quality Standard 61 for Infection control and prevention.

Mainstreaming primary and acute care systems and multispecialty community providers: Sharing the learning

This event focused on sharing the learning coming out of the multidisciplinary community providers and primary and acute care systems new care model vanguards. It looked at what is working well and what can be replicated in other areas around the United Kingdom.

Dementia best practice now online

NHS England has developed a “best practice repository” as part of its online Learning Environment for examples of good dementia care.

Information and Digital Technologies Clinical Requirements 2020

This AoMRC report looks at the use of data and technology in healthcare and concludes that uptake has been slow. It finds that there is now an increasing focus on learning how to use technologies to improve delivery of care for patients. This document aims to ensure that clinical priorities are met and reflected at a national level.

National Guidance on Learning from Deaths

Guidance from NHS England to help standardise and improve the way acute, mental health and community Trusts identify, report, review, investigate and learn from deaths, and engage with bereaved families and carers.

Learning from deaths in the NHS – Tuesday 21 March, London

This is an event for NHS board members to look at how we can better learn from the deaths of patients who received NHS care. 

In particular you'll hear more detail about the new responsibilities of boards for reviewing, investigating and sharing learning from deaths, with a chance to discuss draft guidance and feed back your views.

Each trust has 2 places allocated (excluding ambulance trusts) for:

• your nominated executive lead for patient safety – who is usually the medical or nursing director who also has responsible for mortality
• your nominated non-executive director who will lead and oversee progress on the work on learning from deaths