23 September - What every board member needs to know about improvement and quality assurance
23 September 2021
Today the Good Governance Institute (GGI) and Perfect Ward launch a whitepaper and maturity matrix designed to help healthcare boards find the best ways to provide comprehensive, high-quality universal health and social care services to people.
Quality assurance and improvement is key to healthy and happy patient care. The move to more integrated healthcare systems presents significant opportunities to improve the quality of care, but healthcare boards will need to ensure the way they govern creates the right environment and culture for those opportunities to be realised.
In England, for example, this includes:
Ensuring Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) create parity of esteem for acute, mental health and others around the system including adult social care services
Avoiding adding needless layers of bureaucracy and governance
Regulation will need to shift and adapt to reflect new system arrangements
The report explores the role of quality assurance and improvement and provides practical examples of how boards can make quality assurance and improvement effective and a core part of the board agenda.
With the report we also launch a maturity matrix for healthcare provider boards to enable them to assess themselves across a set of key criteria and understand the improvement journey they can make to apply excellent quality assurance across their organisation.
Andrew Corbett-Nolan, CEO of GGI, said: “Quality assurance is fundamental to excellent and safe patient care, with board responsibility for visibility across any healthcare organisation and where improvements can be made. This paper and maturity matrix comes at a key time, as boards understand how to move forward from the ongoing covid epidemic while ensuring the high quality of care across all services continues.
“I’d encourage all boards to measure themselves against the maturity matrix – it clearly illustrates how to progress from an organisation’s current level in key aspects of quality assurance and what needs to be thought about to get to the most exemplary level.”
Tim Bolot, CEO of Perfect Ward, said: “We are very proud to have commissioned this excellent white paper on quality assurance from GGI. At Perfect Ward, our mission has always been to support our customers in raising the bar in providing high quality care to their patients and residents. We have sought to do this by enabling Boards to get closer to the front line and have real insight and transparency as to the quality of services provided and the impediments to providing better care so that these can be addressed. We believe this white paper is a very useful contribution to Boards as they seek to raise the bar in quality assurance within their organisations and across the sector.”
