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A year of progress towards High Quality Care for All

Lord Darzi has today published his report High Quality Care for All: Our Journey So Far, which examines the progress that has been made since High Quality Care for All was published a year ago. Across each dimension of quality - patient experience, patient safety and clinical effectiveness - Lord Darzi has found that there has been real progress with patients already seeing the difference.

Major improvements highlighted in the report include the opening of 50 new GP led Health Centres, the introduction of personal care plan for 9.3 million patients with long term conditions and the growth in keyhole surgery. The focus on quality has moved up the agenda for staff and organisations, supported by the promotion of innovation through the introduction of tools and funds such as NHS Evidence, the Innovation Fund and the Challenge Prizes.

The report also outlines plans to drive up the quality agenda even further and free up clinicians time to do this.  Proposals include:

• Refining of targets based on evidence - we want to free up front line staff so they can focus on delivering high quality care. We will remove the obsolete 13 week outpatient and 26 week inpatient performance targets, as well as reviewing data collections across the board in order to reduce the burden on front line staff;
• Clinician budget ownership - we will look at giving clinical teams in the acute sector ownership of their budget. Allowing clinical teams to manage their budgets will promote entrepreneurship and innovative delivery of services built around the needs of the patient.
• Peer review accreditation system - we will create a new voluntary peer review system in which clinicians will judge the standard of their peers in order to drive up quality and achieve a 'gold standard' of care. The system will be developed through close collaboration and consultation with the relevant partners and stakeholders.
  

 This document is for print only, a tagged and accessible version will be available shortly

• Download High Quality Care for All: Our journey so far (PDF, 1069K)
• Letter introducing High Quality Care for All, our journey so far