HQIP welcomes the NHS Constitution

One of a number of recommendations in Lord Darzi's report ‘High Quality Care for All', the NHS Constitution was published on 21 January 2009.

HQIP welcomes this publication, the NHS belongs to everyone and this new Constitution brings together in one place what staff, patients and public can expect from the NHS.

We especially welcome the attention paid to Quality of care and environment, and in particular to clinical audit.

These sections emphasise a patient's right to expect NHS organisations to monitor, and make efforts to improve, the quality of healthcare they commission or provide, as well as the right to high-quality care that is safe, effective and right for them.

From April 2010 all PCTs must have arrangements in place to secure continuous improvement in the quality of the healthcare provided by or for them. Furthermore, PCTs are obliged to ensure that providers of GP services have in place clinical governance arrangements and quality assurance systems.

A key part of this process is clinical audit.

The Constitution confirms that individual clinical teams are already encouraged to participate in clinical audit, comparing their standards of care with current best practice. They are also encouraged to share information about what works and new support is being designed to help this process.

However, the Constitution commits to doing more to clarify what high-quality care looks like, by supporting the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) in developing quality standards and establishing NHS Evidence - a tool to improve NHS access to quality-assured information on clinical best practice (what interventions work best for patients) and, increasingly, guidance on the best models for delivering services.

The NHS will also monitor the effectiveness and outcomes of care more systematically through measurement against metrics. These will primarily help local management, although organisations achieving improvements against metrics designed to assess the quality of care can be rewarded financially through the NHS payment mechanism by the Commissioning for Quality and Innovation payment framework.

HQIP looks forward to helping make the new Constitution a reality through the delivery of a successful and balanced national clinical audit programme and the provision of high quality tools and resources to support local clinical audit activity.

The NHS Constitution can be downloaded in full here.

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