Clinical governance
Clinical governance is 'a framework through which organisations are accountable for continually improving the quality of their service and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which care will flourish'.
Harmoni's Group Medical Director, Dr Bruce Websdale, is charged with leading the delivery of a clear clinical governance philosophy and strategy, underpinned by simple, pragmatic business and clinical processes. We work to the guiding principle that empowering our staff enables them to work in a manner that ensures that our objectives of delivering safe and high quality services are achieved.
Integrated governance
All of the business functions within Harmoni are assessed for their impact upon the safety and quality of the services that we deliver. HR, recruitment, finance, IT and communications are all aligned to our corporate clinical governance objectives. We also adopt an integrated approach to our front line delivery of services.
Principles of Harmoni clinical governance
Some of the fundamental principles that underpin Harmoni's approach to clinical governance are:
- Regional delivery, central scrutiny – ensuring that the appropriate reporting of service delivery against the corporate defined performance dashboard takes place and, in particular, to deliver satisfactory performance against the Clinical Quality Indicators.
- To further support high quality clinical governance performance within the regions through dedicated Regional Clinical Governance facilitation. This also enables an internal audit process for quality assurance.
- Central Clinical Governance and Quality Team to be responsible for the business wide oversight and scrutiny of clinical governance procedures and their effectiveness in evidencing the quality and safety of the services delivered in the regions and other service lines.
- To support local areas and service lines with guidance and methodology that assists with:
- Clinician Performance - continuous appraisal of the quality of the clinical and non clinical workforce.
- Risk Management – appropriate management of serious incidents and complaints feeding into the risk management process.
- Education and Training – support all staff in personal development needs including effective development of clinical leadership within the business.
- Audit – to ensure scrutiny of the effectiveness of clinical governance within the business as well as individual clinical performance.
- Medicine Management – the safe prescribing and dispensing of suitable medication across the business.
- Patient Experience – fulfil the objective of responding to our patient views to improve services.
- To ensure trends, variations, exceptions etc across the business are analysed and that consequent learning is disseminated and shared across service lines thereby demonstrating a learning organisation dedicated to continual service improvement.
- To enable a performance dashboard to continually evolve through clinical governance processes feeding back to inform the effectiveness of the indicators of clinical quality.
Our aims
Harmoni's clinical governance strategy aims:
To provide leadership to Harmoni's clinical service provision and ensure that it is delivered to the highest quality and to the safest standards.
To ensure frameworks and standards are set across the business that enable clinical service delivery units to achieve corporate expectations and to provide systematic methods for demonstrating safe and effective service delivery.
To internally scrutinise the effectiveness of the clinical governance structures and systems in a 'continuous improvement cycle'.
To direct the business in its approach to recruiting, inducting and managing the key clinical (and non clinical) staff that deliver services direct to patients, and assure that Harmoni can demonstrate that they are regularly checked for suitability and competence.
To ensure that all regulatory requirements as a healthcare operator are achieved and maintained including CQC Registration and GMC requirements.