This is a dedicated Quality website for staff working within NHS Lothian, Health & Social Care who want to learn about or undertake quality improvement work within their service. If you are looking for NHS Lothian’s main website, please click here.
Thinking about a Quality Improvement project? Find out more about the first steps using our flowchart.
NHS Lothian Quality Strategy
The Quality Strategy was approved in 2018 and sets out Quality Management as a framework for delivery of these objectives.
The Quality Strategy (QS) sets out the common features of a high functioning quality focused Healthcare Organisation which has at its core, the systematic application of Quality Management (QM) with the goal to achieve consistent, high-quality care with minimal morbidity, mortality, discomfort, and positive experience whilst meeting or exceeding all six dimensions of quality (safe, effective, patient centred, timely, effective equitable care). The overall focus is on improving outcomes for patients and health care.
This strategy describes a five-year journey to transform the way NHS Lothian manages change. Continuous improvement in quality and value will be accelerated by scaling up newer approaches from "demonstrators” to everyone’s “business as usual”. NHS Lothian’s QS aims to embedded QM across the organisation, which requires organisational intent, patience, and positive system change.
The Quality Management System will relentlessly focus on eliminating systemic poor quality and waste. The strategy sets out the common features of a consistent approach to Quality Management recognising that local adaptability will drive success. QM engages and empowers teams using tools and techniques to improve care pathways and management processes across the organisation. With human factors, talent management, succession planning and assurance as key components. To create a consistent single management system focused on quality planning, improvement, quality control, and assurance, all four components of a QMS are required and need to be in balance.
Click here to download the NHS Lothian Quality Strategy 2018-2027
Click here to download the NHS Lothian Quality Strategy Interim Review
Click here to download the NHS Lothian Quality Strategy annual update report for 2018/19
NHS Lothian Values, Vision & Mission
NHS Lothian provides a comprehensive range of primary, community-based and acute hospital services for the populations of Edinburgh, Midlothian, East Lothian and West Lothian. Providing services for the second largest residential population in Scotland - around 850,000 people. It employs approximately 24,000 staff.
NHS Lothian has chosen to tackle the long-term challenges of rising demand, rising costs and limited resources in healthcare by making quality the focus of how we run our services.
At NHS Lothian we believe that working together across all areas of the health service is the best way to provide care for patients. Through an innovative programme of modernisation, we are developing into a single integrated health system. Patients and staff are benefiting from the creation of a more streamlined, patient-centred structure and from our more integrated approach to planning and delivering healthcare services.
Quality Improvement Journey
What is Quality Improvement?
Quality Improvement is the framework used to systematically improve care. It involves the use of a systematic and coordinated approach to solving a problem using specific methods and tools with the aim of bringing about a measurable improvement within a health care setting. QI draws on a wide variety of methodologies, approaches and tools. Many of these approaches share underlying principles and include a focus on:
1. Understanding the problem, with a particular emphasis on what your data tells you.
2. Understanding the processes and systems within your organisation, particularly the patient pathway, and whether these can be improved.
3. Analysing a range of data to understand your service, including experience data to inform improvement priorities.
4. Choosing the right tools to make change, including leadership and clinical engagement, skills development, and staff and patient participation.
5. Evaluating and measuring the impact of a change.
NHS Lothian has agreed Our Priorities for Continuous Improvement in February 2020. The Board has discrete corporate objectives that are refreshed annually, relating to improving health of the population, improving quality of care, and improving staff experience. Central to achieving our priorities, is the requirement to develop and carry out robust implementation plans and review their impact on our priorities. Learning from all attempts to make improvement and share that learning with others.