Quality Data Made Accessible To Clinical Teams

Main Category: Public Health
Article Date: 16 Jul 2009 - 5:00 PDT

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NHS clinical teams will have access to data showing their performance against a set of more than 200 indicators of high quality care in the NHS in one place. It is the next phase in the drive to help NHS professionals improve the quality of care they deliver to patients, and will also support providers and commissioners of NHS services.

The Department of Health and The NHS Information Centre have made the data available to allow NHS professionals to use it as a basis to assess local quality improvement. They form an easily accessible menu for NHS staff to carry out local analysis and comparisons between NHS organisations.

The Indicators for Quality Improvement (IQI) have been selected in conjunction with the Royal Colleges, following extensive consultation with the NHS, and are currently based on existing national indicator sets and data collections. Over the next three to five years, the coverage of these will be expanded to more comprehensively address the wide range of NHS and Social Care services NHS professionals provide.

Health Minister, Lord Darzi said:

"These quality indicators have been developed in partnership with frontline staff. This initial list is just the start of a NHS wide resource that will challenge and stimulate NHS staff to drive up the quality of care they deliver to patients.

Throughout my career as a surgeon I have seen the value of having reliable data which allows clinical teams to asses the quality of the service they provide and to constantly challenge themselves to improve. I would encourage all clinicians to visit this site and to begin to use the data to drive up the quality of the services they provide."

Some of the data for the indicators in the IQI is already available to the public on the NHS Choices website. Over the coming year, the intention is to also make the majority of the remainder available on the NHS Choices website.

The NHS Information Centre website, targeted at NHS professionals, will today make the data available for more than 75% of the indicators, with the remainder to follow shortly. The indicators can be found at http://www.ic.nhs.uk/mqi

Source
Department of Health, UK

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