Report of the Director of Quality and Safety.

The Director of Quality and Safety (Lorna Quigley) introduced a report that mapped out Wirral Health and Care Commissioning’s formal functions relating to service quality. It outlined the processes in place and how they translated into actions to improve service quality. The report also proposed areas where consistency of practice across these functions and the wider organisation could be ensured.

The JSCB noted that the Health and Social Care Act 2012 included the duty to continually drive improvements in the quality of services across a comprehensive health and care service and market. Quality was defined in statute as having three dimensions: safety, clinical effectiveness and patient experience.

  It was noted that as an extended team, the Integrated Quality and Safeguarding Team were responsible for quality functions around 4 areas:

·  Monitoring the quality of services

·  Complaints and concerns

·  Professional regulation

·  Untoward Incidents

A table included in the report detailed each of these areas and how the different functions operated. It was noted that because the wide range of legislation, policy and processes in place for both the Council and the CCG, there was no single governance process to cover all these areas; it was the intention that where possible with shared functions, these would be aligned.

The Director reported that in 2016, partners in health and social care had worked with NHS England and a quality risk profile matrix had been established. The purpose of the tool was to ensure that there was a systematic review of the quality indicators, including those where the provider was delivering good quality across those metrics and using soft intelligence as support.

The information gathered from the various sources, reports were triangulated to identify the level of concern/risks and the actions that were required in order to improve quality. The JSCB noted that issues would be reported through the appropriate governance structure dependent upon the issue. Any significant failures identified would be escalated directly to the JSCB.  This approach had been used successfully both locally and particularly when working with partners as it ensured that a systematic and consistent review was undertaken.

No other options were being considered at the present time.

A general discussion ensued around the following issues:

·  The importance of the quality of the service and how it was being robustly monitored was very reassuring.

·  All Commissioning Services – the whole spectrum were in scope as were none commissioned services provided to vulnerable people.

·  The staff were fantastic and committed.  It made sense that they were all joined up together.  The Team was highly commended by the JSCB and the Director undertook to pass this on to the staff.

The NHS Wirral Members and Wirral Borough Council’s three Cabinet Members, sitting as a Committee of the Cabinet

RESOLVED: That

(1)  the functions, processes and governance in place in relation to quality and safety for Wirral Health and Care Commissioning be noted; and

(2)  the processes that are in place to identify quality concerns in order that action is taken in a planned and consistent manner be noted.