The Healthcare Commission has today published two reports focusing on improving safety of care within the NHS.
The reports highlight wide variation in standards between trusts when it comes to safety and notes that performance against the core standards of safety over the last three years of the annual health check has been patchy.
“Overall, performance has not improved – only around 50% of NHS trusts met all of the safety standards in each year,” stated the watchdog.
For example, the indirectly standardised all-cause 30-day hospital mortality rate for all acute trusts in England for the period 1st April 2006 to 31st December 2006 varied between trusts by more than eight-fold.
Likewise the reports show that implementation of actions required in national safety varied by trust.
“Leaving aside variations due to case mix and non-adjusted patient characteristics, this suggests considerable variation in outcomes for patients, some of which may be due to inadequate or unsafe care. There were 8.8% of trusts with significantly lower than expected ratios and 2.4% trusts with significantly higher than expected ratios, when tests of statistical significance were applied,” stated one of the reports.
And while the number of healthcare associated infections had continued to fall, once again wide variation was found between trusts.
The reports called for NHS provider trusts to make safe care their number one priority and to devote sufficient time to safety issues on their board agenda.
In addition it says trusts should set explicit, challenging and measurable goals for improving performance on safety year-on-year.
The two reports are: Safe in the knowledge which aims to help trusts identify and develop measures of improvement to determine whether they are truly commissioning and delivering the safest possible care and: Safely does it which aims to provide trusts with information that is helpful in driving local improvement in the governance and implementation of safer care.