Quality and safety are at the heart of everything we do at Western Sussex Hospitals.
Our staff are committed to achieving the highest possible standards for all the people we serve, and our vision statement – ‘We Care’ – underlines the simple strength of that pledge. We care about patients, we care about quality, we care about safety.
The importance of those three areas of focus has now been formalised in a new Quality Strategy that will set out the ways in which we will deliver quality health care services and those in which we will measure and demonstrate how we do this.
As well as helping make our vision a reality, the Quality Strategy will also enable us to meet the requirements of wider NHS standards, which are also placing a growing emphasis on the quality of services all health organisations provide.
Western Sussex Hospitals’ Quality Strategy follows the recommendations of The Darzi Report in focusing on achieving quality in the three essential elements of patient care:
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Patient outcomes
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Patient safety
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Patient experience
Patient outcomes
Our overall objective is to cut the Trust’s mortality rate by 10 per cent by the end of 2012.
To achieve this, we will specifically target improvements in the care of people who suffer strokes and hip fractures, and reductions in the rates at which patients have to return to hospital after being discharged. We will also undertake an in-depth analysis of elderly care medicine to see what changes can be made there too.
Patient safety
Our goal here is reduce the level of avoidable harm suffered by patients in connection to their hospital care.
Measures we will be taking to do so include improving medicine prescribing practices, continuing to fight against healthcare-associated infections (HCAIs) such as MRSA and C.diff, reducing the risks to patients of falls, and improving the safety of operations.
Patient experience
We also want more patients to be happy to recommend our hospitals to their families and friends – the best evidence that they have experienced quality care.
Key to this will be improvements in discharge planning, reductions in delays to patients returning home, better food and nutritional care, higher standards of cleanliness, better administrative procedures, and quality customer service.
You can read about all these elements in the full version of the Quality Strategy, which available to download below.
Quality Account
We also publish an annual Quality Account, which outlines our hospitals' performance against a wide range of quality measures during the last year and sets out their priorities for the one ahead.
You can read or download the first three Quality Accounts below.
