How the NHS uses its valuable resources in an age of austerity is a growing concern for health professionals, patients and politicians.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC) is an official non-departmental open body of the Department of Health.
It was framed from three forerunner associations:
- The Healthcare Commission
- The Commission for Social Care Inspection (CSCI)
- The Mental Health Act Commission (MHAC)
The CQC’s expressed part is to ensure that healing centers, mind homes, dental and general practices and other care benefits in England furnish individuals with protected, viable and fantastic care, and to urge them to make strides. It helps out this part through looks at it conveys amid the enlistment procedure all new care administrations must finish, investigations and observing of a scope of information sources that can demonstrate issues with administrations.
The Care Quality Commission (CQC), in partnership with NHS improvement, is launching a consultation designed to assess resource management, leadership, and governance within the NHS. The consultation will initially assess non-specialist acute trusts, whose productivity data is more comprehensive than those of acute trusts. The initiative comes from last February’s review by Lord Carter, which saw considerable scope for improved efficiency in staffing and procurement.
The report came to the hardly controversial conclusion that well-led staff that are deployed efficiently are more productive in their roles. Improving staff rosters can have an impact on sickness and absenteeism and allow for better forward planning, as well as identify areas for efficiency improvement.
A Focus on Delivery
NHS trusts will focus on four areas of delivery in the consultation: financial management, operational productivity, how to maximise patient benefit, and how the workforce contributes to that. Initially, there will be an interview stage to the consultation, focusing on questions like staff turnover, pay and skills and career development. Trusts will then be rated on their resource management and graded either outstanding, good, requires improvement or inadequate.
Staffing
This will have clear implications for clinical staffing solutions and providing the best service for the best cost. Companies such as http://www.gandlscientific.com/clinical-staffing-solutions/, which can source clinical staff for NHS trusts, could find themselves very much in demand. The spotlight will undoubtedly fall on budget and staffing factors such as the spend on agency workers for each trust.
Questions will focus on the benefits of non-traditional staffing models. How do the trusts combat excessive pay growth? Are there staffing and skills shortages? What is the trust’s reliance upon agency staff, and are trusts are making efficient use of current staff through innovations like e-rostering?
The CQC is also launching a separate consultation into its approach to inspections of hospital trusts. The plan is to move to small targeted inspections that focus on what matters most to patients. The aim is to improve the standard of CQC inspections by gathering more informative data and improve the quality of care through better provision of services.
Both consultations are expected to run until mid-February 2017.
