About QI at KMPT
What is quality?
Over time KMPT are improving across the entire quality domains and our approach is informed by Lord Darzi’s recommendations. High quality care for all, Lord Darzi’s next stage review, was published on 30 June 2008.
This made the argument that quality of care was best understood from the perspective of the patient or service user. It made a clear distinction between access to care (receiving the care required in a timely and convenient fashion) and quality of care. The report brought clarity to quality by defining three distinct dimensions;
- Safety; the first dimension of quality must be that we do no harm. This means ensuring the environment is safe and clean and as harm and error-free as possible.
- Effectiveness; this means providing care that works as effectively as possible.
- Experience; this means care that is caring: providing services with compassion, dignity, and respect.
What is quality improvement?
Quality Improvement is an integral part of a good quality system.
We want to continuously improve the services we provide to patients, their families and carers. To do this we need to look at what's currently working well and what could be done differently, and we are using a method called Quality Improvement to help us.
QI is about problem solving, continual learning and adaptation. The starting point is to identify a problem where we would like to see improvement, and this becomes a QI project. Anyone with an interest in tackling the project - staff, patients, carers or family members - then form a team to look at the issue and develop a plan, which everyone can play a part in and own, to help bring about the changes we want to see.
We need to be able to measure the affect that our changes are having so that we can see whether they are making a difference to patient care. If we're not seeing the results we want or expect, we can adapt what we're doing to try and get the desired outcome. Using the QI method allows us to do this and helps us take a consistent approach to problem solving. It supports the experts - the people closest to the problem - to find a solution and test it out.
But we don't want to just look at our results, we want to learn from them and grow. QI is about continuous improvement, and sharing our successes, and failures, with colleagues around the Trust so that we can change the way we work and provide outstanding care and treatment that you can be confident in.
