The Secretary of State for Health (Mr Andrew Lansley)
This Government’s ambition is for health outcomes—and our national health service—to be as good as any in the world. To achieve this, the NHS will need to focus on providing high-quality care, led by empowered clinicians, with the patient at the centre of the service. The NHS, free of bureaucratic interference and the tick-box culture, will make quality improvement the central principle along the entire care pathway, integrated with a reformed social care service.
A quality account is an annual report to the public from providers of NHS healthcare services about the quality of their services. It allows clinicians to demonstrate their commitment to continuous, evidence-based quality improvement. By making boards and leaders of healthcare organisations visibly accountable for service quality, in the same way that they are responsible for finances, quality accounts put what matters to patients at the heart of the NHS.
Quality accounts require boards and leaders of healthcare organisations to review quality across all of the healthcare services they offer, and to identify objectives for continuous quality improvement that meet the needs of the public they serve. They are therefore a tool to empower providers and patients to produce the best possible outcomes of care.
The first quality accounts—for providers of acute national health services—have now been published. They are available from the providers themselves, and from the www.nhs.uk website.
We want staff, patients and the wider public to read their local providers’ quality accounts, and then make their views known to the boards and leaders of those providers. The public’s input to their local quality accounts has demonstrated a great willingness to get involved—which provides a clear spur for boards of provider organisations to focus their attention on improving patient care.
This is a step towards focusing the NHS on continuous quality improvement, and allowing patients to see the information they need to make an informed judgment about that commitment to quality improvement. More needs to be done to standardise our definition, measurement and reporting of service quality—along lines that clinicians will recognise as evidence-based and be accountable for. We need to drive up the range and quality of information published, to enable patients to exercise choice. Quality accounts help with this transformation.
For the future, quality accounts will evolve to reflect the Government’s aim of developing a new culture of leadership and responsibility across the NHS. Following a formal evaluation over the summer, we will consult on how the potential of quality accounts can be better realised, including by:
relating the content to emerging outcome measures and quality standards;
building in third party assurance through external audit; and
extending quality accounts to primary and community care providers, following the evaluation of the pilots in the North-East and East Midlands strategic health authorities.
Proposals will be consulted on in the autumn, with updated regulations and guidance to follow later in the year.