Website of the Department of Health

The Transformational Guides for Community Services – ‘Ambition, Action, Achievement!’- will support NHS practitioners and clinical leaders in transforming services locally, providing local staff with the information and tools they need to modernise and improve services in their community. The Guides focus on six key areas:

• health, well-being and reducing inequalities
• acute care closer to home
• people with long-term conditions
• rehabilitation services
• services for children, young people and families
• end of life care.

These Guides, developed with community practitioners, support the ambitions of the Next Stage Review – High Quality Care for All –  that the NHS will focus on delivering high quality personalised health services for patients as close to home as possible.

The Guides will also help commissioners to understand community services better and managers to identify areas where improvements can be made. The Guides contain a number of best practice examples, which have been shown to vastly improve patients’ experience of community health care. For example, by ensuring that staff working in end of life care are trained in discussing with patients and their carers and families the choices they can make, and by using proven high quality care pathways to ensure effective, appropriate care and support.

A Quality Framework Guidance for Community Services published alongside the Guides, will help measure and improve the quality of community services provided. The Guidance includes more than 70 proposed quality indicators which will be tested over the coming months. These range from improvements in health outcomes and perceived quality of life to how long wounds take to heal, and waiting times to access services. They cover aspects of effectiveness, safety and patient experience across a wide range of community services.

The work that is now underway to assess the proposed indicators set out in the Quality Framework for Community Services will help to ensure that we can ‘measure what we value’ in terms of the quality of services we provide for patients. We can then move forward and use these good practice examples across the wider NHS.