Quality

Dorset HealthCare is 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.

The Trust's 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 the Trust's 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.

The Trust's 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

The Trust's 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
  To support staff to implement the quality standards set by the National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) to enable the provision of high quality, evidence-based care to our patients.
  Learn more about clinical effectiveness.