An initiative to improve patient safety and quality of service in GP practices has won the Primary Care Initiative of the Year at this year’s HSJ Patient Safety Awards – an esteemed national awards programme, designed to encourage and drive improvements in culture and quality across the NHS.
The Leicester, Leicestershire and Rutland Integrated Care Board’s (LLR ICB) Quality and Safety Team, alongside GP Clinical Lead for Quality – Dr Nick Glover, transformed a commissioning assurance process into a supportive digital toolkit for GP practices. By completing this self-assessment toolkit, GP practices can demonstrate compliance against regulated activities and patient safety standards as well as accessing support available in all domains.
The toolkit has enabled sustainable improvements in the quality of outcomes and patient experiences for over a million patients locally; and has demonstrated the scalability and spread locally, regionally, and nationally.
Dr Nick Glover said: “The toolkit encourages GP practices, in a supportive way, to look at their own systems and processes to improve patient safety and practice resilience. As a result, we saw a significant increase in practices requesting support to make improvements in several key areas, such as safeguarding, infection prevention and control, and clinical audit. During 2023-24 we responded to 138 additional requests of support, which would not routinely have been sought without the implementation of this toolkit”.
“It is really satisfying for the whole team behind this initiative, to be able to support practices to improve services for our patients locally”.
CQC ratings concur that the implementation and support shared via the toolkit, has resulted in safer and higher quality GP services across LLR. From 2021-22 to 2023-24, the CQC ratings of LLR practices who completed the toolkit has increased from overall 56% ‘good’ to 92%, with a reduction in overall ‘inadequate’ ratings from 13% to 1%.
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