Quality assurance

Harmoni's vision is to treat patients as family. In line with this vision, we aim to provide high quality and safe services underpinned by the Harmoni quality statement and the ethos of "treating patients as family and staff as you would wish to be treated yourself".

Harmoni's assurance frameworks monitor quality by analysing existing working processes and methods. Our goal is to ensure that excellence is inherent in every component of these processes. Quality assurance also helps us to determine whether the policies and procedures used to provide the service are appropriate, safe and fit for purpose. There is a continuous cycle of quality assurance in place throughout the organisation.

There are several ways that quality assurance is addressed in Harmoni:

• We have a mandatory audit programme that has been designed alongside national standards, local standards and Harmoni policies. These audits are completed locally and reported corporately. This ensures that local action plans are completed and, when necessary, local and company wide actions can be taken in response to trends that have been identified.

The programme includes an audit of the care that clinicians provide, Harmoni processes (call handling, reception etc.) and compliance to policies. There are also agreed methods of identifying where an audit needs to take place that is outside of the mandatory programme.

• There is a robust process in place for all complaints, comments, concerns, serious incidents requiring investigation (SIRIs) and incidents. All of the issues that are raised are investigated thoroughly. There are clear systems in place to ensure that any points of learning from these are documented and actioned.

• Risk management principles are crucial to assure that we provide a safe service. All risk registers are owned locally, via the Regional Medical Directors, and there is a clear escalation process to the corporate risk register.

• Harmoni is compliant to the Information Governance Standard of Compliance Toolkit and has reached level 2. Some standards achieved level 3 compliance.

• Harmoni publishes an internal quarterly newsletter called "Reflect". This details the learning achieved from complaints, comments, concerns, incidents, compliments and audits. By sharing the learning points and best practice, we ensure that Harmoni continues to provide a high quality service.

• Harmoni will register the healthcare services we provide with the Care Quality Commission (CQC) in April 2012.

• There are robust reporting processes in place to ensure that any issues effecting quality are addressed. Various groups check the quality of the service provided, including the Oversight and Scrutiny Group, Risk Management Group, Medicines Management Group, Information Governance Group, local and regional quality assurance groups. The Quality and Risk Committee oversees all assurance groups.