Quality and Value

The UCLPartners Clinical Quality Programme works with our partners to drive ongoing improvements in outcomes for patients and value in health care delivery. The Programme has three pillars.

1. Developing “Whole system” Quality measures

Measuring and improving clinical quality is at the core of each UCLPartners clinical programme. Working with patients and health care professionals across all phases of care, we are developing a set of holistic quality measures for important patient pathways such as stroke, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), women’s health and major cancers. These measures span the whole system of care, and are underpinned by the principle of improving health rather than just providing health care¹.

By pairing such measures with the cost of delivering care, we focus on continually improving the value delivered. We are actively developing information systems to make it possible to track both quality and cost at the level of the individual patient – for example, we are working in COPD in several communities to improve cost and quality simultaneously over a year-in-the-life of patients.

2. Developing Quality Improvement Science

Despite the dedication of millions of highly-trained staff, striking quality and safety gaps exist in all health systems. For example, mortality rates vary by over 50% between hospitals, after adjusting for severity of illness. UCLPartners is committed to helping our partners close these gaps – and to making cutting-edge quality improvement techniques mainstream in the NHS. To translate this vision into reality, we are working to develop the new Science of  health care quality improvement, an academic discipline for the delivery of health care that draws both on biomedicine and on research traditions such as psychology, anthropology, and engineering².

3. Helping our partners share good practice on Quality

UCLPartners presents a novel opportunity to share good practice across partner organisations in a systematic way. We have established the UCLPartners Quality Forum – made up of senior clinical leads from across our sector – to facilitate knowledge-sharing and cross-Trust quality initiatives. For example, a project to halve avoidable cardiac arrests is currently underway across all our partner Trusts.

We are using several other mechanisms to help our partners develop the understanding and capacity to measure quality and continually improve it. These include introducing quality and safety explicitly into undergraduate curricula and in continuing professional development programmes for doctors, nurses and AHPs. We also offer awareness and skill-building events, such as a conference jointly hosted with Monitor and attended by 600 clinical leaders and executives from across the system. Read more about the event here

For more information, please contact Dr James Mountford, Director of Clinical Quality at UCLPartners.

¹ Mountford J and Davie C (2010) Toward an Outcomes-Based Health Care System: A view from the United Kingdom, JAMA. 304(21): 2407-08

² Berwick D (2008) The Science of Improvement, JAMA. 299(10): 1182-3