Healthcare News
Out of Hours
Out of hours care is currently very much in the public and political focus following widely publicised cases of failings in the system with tragic consequences.
Public satisfaction with out of hours services and knowledge of them can be gauged at a very high level through the responses to Q30-36 in the National GP Patient Survey, but this gives little specifics about the patient’s experience of care or what measures are needed by the out of hours provider to improve care.
CFEP’s Out of Hours questionnaire (OPQ) captures detail from individual patients about their experience of contact with services, whether that be a phone consultation, home visit or treatment centre attendance, and in specific their rating of the communication skills of the clinician involved in their care which has often been the source of complaints.
CFEP’s detailed feedback reports can help build a picture of both organisational capacity and capability as well as the communications skills of those who work within it. They can of course be used as examples of organisational quality and competence when tendering or re-tendering for contracts with commissioners.
General Medical Council: PQ and CQ
The GMC is currently consulting on its recommendations for the relicensing and recertification of doctors in the UK. This includes specific recommendations on the use and administration of patient and colleague feedback. The consultation runs until June 2010 and all the key documents are available on the GMC website.
RCGP reports on revalidation
The RCGP has issued the third version of its a Guide to Revalidation for General Practitioners RCGP report on survey tools.
This guide is subject to final approval by the GMC and the results of their consultation but lays out the College’s views on how the revalidation process will take place.
The RCGP has also published an independent review on currently available patient and colleague instruments (PDS Comparison of MSF Instruments Report for RCGP).
This report identifies the GMC CQ and PQ tools and also IPQ as suitable for revalidation. CFEP has submitted further data on its CFET tool and is awaiting further feedback from the College on its suitability.
Co-Creating Health Initiative (CCHi)
CFEP
has been appointed to design and deliver the Advanced Development Programme for
Clinicians (ADP) as part of a major nationwide project commissioned by The
Health Foundation. This project is designed to demonstrate that increased
provision of self-management support leads to improved health outcomes for
people with long term conditions. The project runs for three years from 2007 to 2010.
The ADP course is designed to enable clinicians to acquire and strengthen the
skills they need to provide self-management support. The programme consists of
workshops, web-based learning and action learning sets. The workshops are
supported by the Patient Partnership in Care (PPiC) questionnaire. (More
here)
The Health Foundation has more information on their web site here.
Three years of IPQ shows improvements across the board.
Improving the experience of patients is at the heart of the NHS quality initiatives. The NHS wants to see a patient-driven, patient-led,
patient-focused, and patient-centred service for all patients. A key aspect to this policy is the views of patients.
The national patient survey programme was one of the strategies undertaken to allow the NHS to gather the views of its patients and to allow comparisons
across organisations over time. Over the past three cycles of QOF, almost two million patients have completed a CFEP UK Surveys’ analysed questionnaire. This
report summarises the key findings from an evaluation of the IPQ surveys over the past three cycles of QOF.
To download the document in PDF click here Evaluation of three cycles of QOF.pdf