Nurses Day! - Birmingham Children's Hospital

SECTION THREE
Our Quality Report
Chief Executive’s Statement on Quality
Our organisation is committed to putting the quality
of care we provide at the centre of everything that
we do. We have ensured that this remains at the
forefront of our agenda by embedding it as the first
of our six strategic objectives.
This commitment is not just about maintaining
the status quo but about continual learning and
improvement. There is no health care organisation
worldwide that can’t in some way improve the
services it provides for its patients and our hospital
is no exception.
During the year our Quality Committee has become
central to this agenda, ensuring that there is a
continual oversight and challenge as to how we
can further improve what we do. This is enhanced
through the work programme of the Board of
Directors - its agenda is structured to focus on
service quality and safety first and foremost. This is
achieved through a range of methods, for example
a detailed quality report is scrutinised, discussed
and debated on a monthly basis. We also use
patient stories and quality walkabouts to ensure
that we look beyond the figures within the report.
We are proud of some of the initiatives and
innovations that have been developed over the past
year to improve quality. We recognise that feedback
from our staff about the services that we provide
and their own experience of working at the Trust
is invaluable in the quality agenda. For example,
we have developed tools to support junior doctors
(Training Advice & Liaison Service) and to capture
their experience of training at the hospital.
Recognising the hard work and commitment of
staff as our most valuable asset is important to the
Trust. We launched a monthly ‘Star of the Month’
award during the last year and some of the stories
of staff working in a diverse range of roles are truly
inspirational. Each year we celebrate the work
of our staff with an annual awards event saying
thank you for their contribution over the past twelve
months.
We have also used technology to improve the
quality of the patient experience. Our App for
Smart Phones allows us to capture the experience
of our patients and their families in real time and
quickly address any issues. All these responses
are captured live on our public website increasing
transparency of the whole process.
We are rightly upheld at a local, regional and
national level for the work that we do on patient
experience. We are proud of the various ways in
which we engage with children and young people
to address how we can improve our services. Our
Young Persons Advisory Group (YPAG) has been
visited most recently by Dr Hilary Cass, president of
the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health,
and had input into a range of service areas and
initiatives. For example, the group helped design
a new Dignity Giving Suit to replace the traditional
backless robes used in hospitals.
To the best of my knowledge the information
contained in this Quality Account is accurate.
………………………………………………
David Melbourne, Interim Chief Executive
Priorities for Improvement
At Birmingham Children’s Hospital, ensuring that we
provide a high quality service is central to everything
we do and this is embedded within our strategy.
We are always looking for ways that we can improve
the quality of our services. This can include making
the experience better for the patients and families
that use our services; changing the way we work so
we can treat every patient that needs or chooses
to come to BCH without any delays; making
things safer than ever before and improving health
outcomes for the diverse range of children and
young people that we see every day.
It is important that we focus our resources on making
improvements where they are needed most, so we
continually monitor and analyse a wide range of
information that tells us where we could do better.
This includes:
l Listening to the children, young people and
families that use our services. There are lots of
ways they can tell us what they think, and
we take account of it all to work out what’s most
important to them:
Complaints, comments and concerns
Feedback cards
Surveys
Patient stories
Feedback App
Websites like NHS Choices and
Patient Opinion
Consultations
Mystery Shoppers
l Listening to our staff. The views of the staff who
work in our hospital every day are vital and we
encourage them to tell us what they think
through surveys, consultations and feedback
events. It’s also really important that we keep an
eye on their happiness and make sure they’re
fully supported so that they are able to deliver
the best services they can.
l Listening to others. The views of BCH groups
like the Young Person Advisory Group help us
focus on how to make the improvements that are
needed.
l Analysing information about the quality of
services, such as patient safety incidents and
clinical audits.
l Using best practice examples, national targets
and learning from and benchmarking with other
organisations.
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Using this information has helped us to identify
Quality Priorities, which are the main areas we
want to focus on to improve quality. Each priority
has a goal and a way of measuring our progress in
reaching it. These relate to the three elements of
quality: Patient Experience, Clinical Effectiveness,
and Safety. The priorities we are reporting on this
year are:
In 2013/14 we will also report on some additional
priorities that we have been developing during
2012/13:
Safety:
Patient Experience:
Patient Experience
Emergency Department Transfers
Staff Survey
Food and Nutrition
Tertiary Inpatient Referrals
Play and Activities
Cancelled Operations
Clinical Effectiveness
Nursing Care Quality Indicators
CAMH Service User Satisfaction
Asthma Care
Health Promotion
Safety
Pressure Ulcers
Preventing MRSA
Reducing Acute Life Threatening Events, and
Cardiac and Respiratory Arrests
Reducing Healthcare Acquired Infections in PICU
Reducing MSSA
Zero Avoidable Deaths Reducing rates of
Clostridium Difficile
Reducing Medication Incidents Resulting in Harm
WHO Safe Surgery Checklist Completion
Extravasation Injuries
Friends and Family test
(for children and young
people)
Clinical Effectiveness: Implementing the Sepsis
Care Bundle
These priorities and what we’ve achieved in
2012/13 are set out over the next few pages of this
Quality Account.