We are committed to delivering high-quality care first time, every time, for everyone. We aim to nurture a culture that supports and empowers staff and patients alike, allowing us to provide care that is kind, compassionate, safe and effective. 

Our Quality Account is an annual evaluation of the quality of the services we provide, and the programmes we have in place to continually improve our services. 

It sets out our key objectives regarding quality, aligned to the Care Quality Commission's key areas of focus, which consider whether services are safe, effective, caring, responsive and well-led. 

Our commitment to quality is underpinned by our work to maintain and monitor clinical effectiveness, which ensures our work is evidence-based, effective and founded on the principles of good practice. 

Our quality priorities 

Our current quality priorities focus on: 

Patient experience 

To ensure patients and carers are engaged and active participants in care planning and delivery, and to recognise quickly when care goes wrong and talk openly and honestly to patients and carers. Learn more about patient experience. 

Patient safety 

To reduce the number of patients using our service who experience an unexpected deterioration in their physical condition which results in an admission to an acute general hospital. Learn more about patient safety. 

Clinical effectiveness

We are committed to ensuring that the care we provide is evidence-based, effective and founded on the principles of good practice. 

Clinical effectiveness includes monitoring and improving the outcomes for patients and service users, as well as: 

  • ensuring staff are up to date in their practices and properly supervised where necessary 

  • involvement in local and national clinical audits. 

We have also implemented projects to capture patient-reported outcomes or goals to ensure that our services are working in partnership with service users/patients to help them achieve their goals.

Clinical audit 

We work to an annual programme of clinical audits, both national and local. Clinical audit involves measuring the quality of our care and services against agreed standards, and making improvements where necessary. Where necessary, action plans are put in place to make sure we meet those standards, and re-audits are carried out to measure whether improvements have taken place.