Clinical Effectiveness

The Trust is committed to ensuring that the interventions and treatments that we provide are evidence based, effective and based on the principles of good practice.

In summary clinical effectiveness is a commitment to quality, which includes monitoring and improving the outcomes of patients and service users

• ensuring health professionals are up to date in their practices and properly supervised where necessary
• implementation of best practice including National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) guidance and quality standards
• involvement in local and national clinical audits

 

Clinical Audit

Clinical audit is all about measuring the quality of care and services against agreed standards and making improvements where necessary.

The Trust sets an annual programme of clinical audits - both national and local. Where necessary action plans are put in place to improve compliance with standards and re-audits are carried out to measure whether improvements have occurred.

The Trust is currently involved in the following national audits:

• Prescribing Observatory for Mental Health (POMH-UK) - mental health prescribing audits

 

In addition to Clinical Audit, the Trust is also committed to the development of Patient Reported Outcomes/goals to ensure that services are working in partnership with service users/patients in working towards their own goals/outcomes.

The Trust's priority relating to clinical effectiveness as outlined in the 2011/12 Quality Account is:

To roll out Patient Reported Outcome Measures across mental health services that transferred to the Trust in 2011/12 and to pilot their use in community health services during 2012/13.