Review of acute hospital services in the Mid - Health Service Executive

Assured quality
Review of acute hospital services in HSE Mid-West
An action plan for acute and community services
The key requirements for ensuring assured quality of future healthcare delivery are as
follows:
• Sufficient, appropriately trained and accredited workforce which is able to:
- Engage in redesigning and delivering services through new patterns, locations and
times of delivering healthcare with new technologies;
- Develop new extended roles for nurses and allied health professionals, while
recognising the significant time lag often present in retraining;
- Meet European Working Time Directives on maximum working hours through
appropriately staffed and designed rotas;
• A formal system of clinical governance and peer review to ensure an effective quality of
patient and staff safety through a cycle of audit, feedback and improvement. This
includes the balance of safety, quality, volume, risk and evidence about better clinical
outcomes from higher volumes, for example for specialist procedures such as paediatric
surgery, some cancers, certain types of trauma and vascular surgery;
• Having access to systematic and routine horizon scanning for the impact of service and
clinical developments across therapies, procedures, drugs, imaging and devices,
including:
- Diagnosis and treatment on a minimally invasive basis;
- Surgery being replaced by drugs and other interventions;
- Implantable devices;
- New less invasive imaging technologies; and
- Genetic testing supporting individual specific drug treatments.
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Health Department Letter 69: Promoting the Development of Managed Clinical Networks in NHS Scotland, Scottish
Executive, September 2002.
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