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Written by Head of Communications
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Welcome to our third Quality Account for Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust.
This publication describes just how seriously we consider quality and safety issues in our two hospitals and how we work continuously to make the right improvements.
We want both patients and visitors to feel confident of the quality of our services and this Quality Account sets out our priorities for improvement and details how we have performed against some key quality measures over the last year.
However, it’s important to note that this is just one part of our approach to improving quality, and we have in place a number of other monitoring processes and initiatives – for example our monthly quality report which goes to the Trust Board – which help us to make continual improvements on behalf of our patients. |
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And, to make sure the Board is fully engaged with care right on the front line, we regularly invite patients to come and present to the Board – describing their individual experiences, good or otherwise. In addition, regular walkabouts around our hospitals, talking to patients and staff, also help our Board members have a good understanding of what it is like to be a patient in our hospitals.
Overall 2011/12 has seen many positive highlights for the Trust and many assurances that we continue to offer high quality and safe care to our patients. On 1st April last year we maintained our registration with the Care Quality Commission and have continued to score well against the majority of quality and performance standards, comfortably meeting the 18-week and cancer waiting targets and celebrating our best ever year for infection control, with just over a year without an MRSA hospital-acquired bacteraemia (see page 10 for more details).
I am also pleased that we continue to have good clinical outcomes, including being rated as a top performer nationally for patients with broken hips, and demonstrating good results for many of the most common conditions needing hospital admission such as care following a heart attack, pneumonia, stroke, hip and knee replacements; with lower than expected mortality rates. We have been particularly successful in reducing the number of falls taking place in our hospitals (see page 14) and are making continual improvements to patient experience both on our wards and in our outpatient areas.
However, an unannounced visit by the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in December last year, whilst highlighting many positives, also raised a number of concerns which we recognised needed focused attention. Most of these were issues we were already addressing, particularly how we manage patients through our hospitals when demand for beds overtakes normal capacity (as was the case across Surrey this winter).
The key concerns raised were around the use of our Day Surgery Unit as an escalation area (which has now stopped), lack of evidence around full compliance with mandatory training and the recoding of (some) care records. We take these issues extremely seriously and responded with a swift action plan which has been monitored regularly at both Board and Executive level to ensure we meet the agreed timescales.
As this publication goes to press we are confident that we have fully addressed the issues raised and continue to work hard across our hospitals to ensure we meet all 16 of the CQC’s quality and safety outcomes.
Overall I am pleased with the improvements we continue to make at Ashford and St Peter’s; our performance to date and our quality reports confirm that our two hospitals continue to be safe places for patients to receive care and treatment.
The information provided in this Quality Account is provided from our data management systems and our quality improvement systems and to the best of my knowledge is accurate, and provides a true reflection of our organisation.
Andrew Liles
Chief Executive
Previous Accounts
You can download previous years below:
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Last Updated on Tuesday, 31 July 2012 13:25 |
