Mental health providers should adopt ‘quality improvement’

20 July 2017Mental health providers should adopt quality improvement to improve patient care, anew report from The King's Fund finds. 
Quality improvement, the continual change of services through testing, measuring, reviewing and refining, is becoming increasingly common in NHS organisations. But the report finds that while mental health providers are increasingly adopting this approach in individual teams or services, more need to do this across their organisations.The report finds that quality improvement can affect both quality and efficiency of care. This includes reducing lengths of stay, waiting times, bed numbers and bed occupancy. It can also reduce staff absence, violent incidents involving staff and first appointment non-attendance.If quality improvement is done systematically by engaged frontline teams, it can lead to sustained improvements that are shared across the organisation. The report also notes that mental health providers have a long history of involving users in service design, making them particularly well-placed to using quality improvement to support innovation.
The report warns that successfully adopting quality improvement across the organisation takes time. It is also important to engage and empower frontline teams to develop solutions rather than imposing them from the top of the organisation. Shilpa Ross, Senior Researcher at The King's Fund and one of the report authors, said:‘As the Care Quality Commission highlights i...

Source: The King's Fund - Press - July 20, 2017 Category: UK Health Source Type: news