What is Clinical Governance?
Clinical governance is a set of procedures that enable trusts to maintain and improve the quality of patient care.
Why is it important?
Delivering excellent clinical services is a major focus for the NHS. An important part of this is finding out from patients themselves what their experience of treatment has been like. We share this aim and our staff are committed to providing the highest quality care.
The Department of Health has set out the level of quality that healthcare organisations are expected to meet in areas such as safety, governance, patient focus, public health, clinical and cost effectiveness.
Within each of these areas are a number of targets and standards that we have to work towards. All NHS providers are assessed against these. The results tell the government and the public how safe and effective services are.
Our clinical governance action plan ensures that we achieve and continuously improve our standards. This has contributed to our services being awarded the highest level for the fifth consecutive year in 2009.
How does it work?
Most of the procedures of clinical governance are based upon paying close attention to well-established, common-sense knowledge about how to run a good clinical service.
In practical terms, clinical governance policies cover the following:
- keeping good patient records and case notes
- doing audits to identify areas of procedures & practices that need improvement
- planning how to identify possible risks or problems and putting steps in place to reduce them
- doing incident reports to aid investigation of problems
- doing evidence-based research
- working closely with patients to improve services
The trust produces a clinical governance handbook for all clinical staff. This contains the policies developed within these committees to enable them to provide a high quality clinical service. New staff need to refer to this handbook as soon as they begin work, and all clinical staff attend a clinical induction training day.
Find out more
Clinical governance is continuously evolving. Everyone can play a part in its development. If you have any questions, suggestions or comments, please contact Irene Henderson via the following address:
The Clinical Governance Support Office
The Tavistock and Portman NHS Foundation Trust
120 Belsize Lane
London NW3 5BA
Tel: 020 8938 2158
Email: ihenderson@tavi-port.nhs.uk
