Quality

The role of our Quality and Safety Team is to ensure that services are safe, effective and in line with the needs of the population.

Quality is made up of three key elements:

• clinical effectiveness
• patient safety
• patient experience.

There is more information about quality on the National Quality Board website.

We work collaboratively with all providers of health and social care in Nottingham and Nottinghamshire to monitor and review information to ensure that safe, effective and high quality, caring health services are commissioned and delivered for local people of all ages. 

We use our risk management arrangements to identify, assess, and mitigate risks across the services we commission. This involves working closely with our health and care partners to manage system-wide risks, ensuring a coordinated and collective approach to maintaining the safety and effectiveness of services.

Our Governance Handbook has more information about the quality governance arrangements.

We use a variety of methods to ensure assurance, including agreed and aligned quality schedules and regular formal contract and quality review meetings. This provides a robust picture of service quality and gives greater insight into local service delivery. This is supported by clear data and reporting through our System Analytics Intelligence Unit.

Open and transparent relationships allow us to work collaboratively with partners to identify key areas of focus for quality improvement, share best practice across the system and ensure that learning from incidents, complaints, feedback and events, informs service improvement. We support system learning through our patient safety forums, underpinned by a system wide implementation of the Patient Safety Incidence Response Framework methodology and a commitment to being a learning organisation.  

Our focus includes quality support to transformation priorities including urgent and emergency care, Local Maternity and Neonatal and Learning Disabilities transformation, and children and young people aligned to our NHS Joint Forward Plan.

We work in close local partnership with our local authorities to ensure high quality Special Educational Needs and Disabilities reforms, learning disability and autism, children’s services, home care and care homes and safeguarding services.