Northampton General Hospital NHS Trust Quality Account 2016-2017

General Improvements in 2016/17
Quality Improvement
We have made Quality Improvement (QI) work a key point of focus to improve the care that we
provide to our patients and have described this in our Quality Improvement Strategy.
To ensure that the learning can be captured and shared across the Trust, we developed a central
repository that is supported by the QI team. This provides a library of projects & ideas that may
benefit from further project work/development and will reduce areas of duplication & replication.
This has been an important development for our organisation as it will particularly highlight work
that is sustainable and can be transferred between teams to become business as usual.
During 2016/17 we had more than 40 projects across the Trust which were supported by our QI
team some examples of which are listed below:
Improving Nurse Knowledge of Acute Kidney Injury
Improving early Discharge by earlier engagement with family/carers
Reducing the amount of inappropriate cannula’s
Improving the accessibility of patient observations on admission unit ward rounds
Doctor Toolbox
Documentation of cardiac arrest management in out of hours cardiac arrest
Standardisation of procedure specific equipment trays
Improving Electronic Discharge Notification (eDN) completion in Urology.
Effectiveness of the falls assessment form
Improving access to gynaecology equipment for emergency assessment
Improving accessibility to common guidelines
Introducing a discharge system for medically fit for patients who requiring four times
daily intravenous antibiotics
Improving surgical handover
Medical Emergency Team trial
Improving the efficiency of giving medications by 25% on Holcot ward
Night team handover
Care of the patients on the stroke pathway who are ‘nil by mouth’
Improving the paging system
Rapid tranquilisation
Support of the Trust rollout of the SAFER bundle
Improving accessibility of bedside sharps disposal
Situation, Background, Assessment, Recommendation (SBAR) communication tool
implementation
Improving compliance with Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) risk assessment
Improving medical weekend handover plans
Introducing a daily ’10 minute conversation’ for the emergency team
Improving access to emergency protocols
A multidisciplinary approach to learning from error
Reflecting the high level of QI activity, the Trust submitted 17 projects for consideration by the
Patient First conference. In all, we made 49 conference submissions this year, with 18 of these
being shortlisted for presentation and the Trust received 4 QI awards.
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