30 March, 2011
New Toolkit to Improve Quality of Urgent and Emergency Care
A learning tool to support the quality of urgent and emergency care services for patients is being launched today at the Royal College of General Practitioners.
The Urgent and Emergency Care Clinical Audit Toolkit, which has been extensively piloted , will help provide a seamless approach to promote quality care across a range of NHS services. The toolkit is for all providers of urgent and emergency care, including clinicians and non-clinicians, out of hours doctors, emergency departments, walk-in centres, GP medical practices, pre-hospital emergency care doctors, NHS Pathways, NHS Direct, the Ambulance Service, and urgent care centres.
The complex nature of the patient pathway for urgent care and the variety of different types of care workers with direct patient contact means that such services face particular challenges in ensuring continued monitoring of clinical standards for consistency and quality improvement. The new toolkit provides practical guidance to providers on checking the quality and care provided and continually learning from experience to improve care regardless of setting.
Dr Clare Gerada, RCGP Chair, said,
"We would urge all those responsible for care in these areas to routinely use this toolkit for their auditing. Urgent care is usually accessed at a time when patients can be at their most frightened and vulnerable. Our patients have a basic right to a high quality of urgent care at whatever time they use the health service and we have the knowledge and ability to provide robust system checks to help deliver and ensure good, safe practice."
The toolkit has been produced by the RCGP in partnership with the College of Emergency Medicine (CEM) and is endorsed by the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health. The toolkit was produced and piloted with funding from the Department of Health.
Professor Matthew Cooke, Clinical Director of Urgent and Emergency Care at the Department of Health, said,
"This toolkit has been developed to support clinical audit across the range of urgent and emergency care settings from out–of–hours GP services to ambulance services to emergency departments. As such, it is well–placed to support greater consistency and reliability of care across these different settings."
"We would like to see the Urgent and Emergency Care Clinical Audit Toolkit adopted by all urgent care providers to ensure a seamless, safe and effective journey for all patients wherever urgent care is provided."
Mr John Heyworth, President of the College of Emergency Medicine, said,
"The recognition that urgent and emergency care comprises a continuum of practice will drive better, more consistent models of care. The current fragmented system inevitably leads to confusion and uncertainty amongst the public."
"Quality assurance and continuous improvement are fundamental requirements of any healthcare system. This robust and tested toolkit will provide those involved in commissioning and providing urgent and emergency care 24/7 with an invaluable addition to evaluate current practice and deliver better care for our patients."
Professor Terence Stephenson, President of the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health, said,
"We recently undertook a study of how parents with a febrile child try to navigate through the various options for urgent and emergency care and this certainly reinforced the fact that the public find advice confusing and sometimes contradictory."
"Providing a ready made audit toolkit to help clinicians undertake clinical audit in urgent and emergency care will be very helpful particularly as the National Health Service is envisaged as having an increasing number of competing providers. We know that a quality service is one which is safe, effective and as good an experience as possible for the patient and their carers, and audit can address all three elements of a good quality service."
Antony Chuter, Lay Chair of the RCGP Patient Partnership Group, said,
"We feel that patients will ultimately gain a lot from providers' use of this toolkit, in particular improved quality of care, consistency and safety with better quality checks wherever a patient with urgent care- needs presents in the system . We are also glad to see that it is the profession itself that is leading on this issue to ensure quality care is at the heart of decisions in this area."
The Urgent and Emergency Care Clinical Audit Toolkit has been produced through the RCGP Clinical Innovation and Research Centre (CIRC) under the leadership of Dr Agnelo Fernandes, RCGP Clinical Champion for Urgent Care. The toolkit can be found on the RCGP and CEM websites.
FURTHER INFORMATION
RCGP Press office – 020 3188 7576/7575/7574
Out of hours: 07885 958 632