Quality Accounts - South Devon NHS Foundation Trust.
The South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust has now been registered under the Care Quality Commission’s new system for monitoring and regulating standards of care.
These new legal powers came into force on the 1st April 2010, and stated that all NHS Trusts in England will be required to register with the Care Quality Commission to be lawfully allowed to provide care.
NHS Hospitals are the first to come into the new system and now have a responsibility to ensure that care is not just about cleanliness of the clinical areas, but also ensuring patients are safe, treated respectfully and are fully involved in decisions about their care.
Why are LINks being asked to get involved with Quality Accounts? Over the last year, the Department of Health has engaged widely with healthcare providers, commissioners, patient groups and third sector organisations in the development of Quality Accounts. The opportunity for local scrutiny was seen as an important feature to ensure that Quality Accounts are locally meaningful and reflect local priorities.
The role of LINks in Quality Accounts forms part of this local scrutiny, along with roles for Overview and Scrutiny Committees (OSCs) and commissioning PCTs.
The Torbay Health Scrutiny Board and Torbay LINk have decided to comment jointly on South Devon Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust’s Quality Account 2010/11. This is what they had to say….
“Torbay Health Scrutiny Board and Torbay LINk would like to congratulate the trust on its successes in 2009/10 and looks forward to co-operating through 2010/11 to support the trust in providing quality improvement and high quality care to patients. We believe that, based on the knowledge we have of the provider, this Account is an overall fair reflection of the healthcare services provided.
We would like to congratulate the Trust on improvements to the control of infection which show a marked decrease due to the hard work of the staff. Also, we welcome the stroke care achievements recognised in the national audit and approve the identification of the treatment of stroke patients within the specialist stroke unit as an area for extra effort. To help ensure that a greater proportion of patients admitted with a stroke spend the vast majority of their time in hospital on the stroke unit we would suggest that this issue be included in the Priorities for Improvement in the year ahead. We welcome the prioritisation of improvements for patients admitted as an emergency and for ambulance handover times in the Emergency Department – information received by the Health Scrutiny Board confirms this as an area for significant concern and part of a wider issue of poor flow through the hospital”
To see the full comment please contact the office.