Welcome to our fourth Quality Account for Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. This publication describes just how seriously we consider quality and safety issues in our two hospitals and how we work continuously to make the right improvements. We want both patients and visitors to feel confident of the quality of our services, and this Quality Account sets out our priorities for improvement and details how we have performed against some key quality measures over the last year. However, this report can only give a snapshot of the work we are doing, and there are many other initiatives and pieces of work taking place across our hospitals to improve care for our patients. PDF format The latter part of this year has of course been dominated by the publication of the second Francis Report, demonstrating the shocking consequences of what can happen when quality and safety processes fail.

As you would expect, like other healthcare providers across the country, we have spent time reflecting on the report from Board level to the front line of care to assure ourselves that we have the right processes and checks in place to ensure the failings at Mid Staffordshire Hospitals could not happen here. But of course it’s about much more than process; what Francis has highlighted most is the importance of attitude and culture. What was so shocking in the report was almost less about the incidents themselves but the fact that no-one did anything about them.

It’s critical that patients, their families, members of staff – at whatever level they work – should feel confident they can raise concerns safely, and that something will happen as a result. It’s the most basic ingredient in our duty of care. We’ve spent a lot of time over the past year developing our patient feedback methods, encouraging patients and their families to talk directly with us about their concerns and we want to develop this even further in the future. Led by the Board, we’re also spending more time talking with staff, through organised listening events, informal walkabouts, team meetings and so on, working together to create a much more open culture and to support team development across our clinical Divisions.

Overall 2012/13 has seen many positive highlights for the Trust and assurance that we continue to offer high quality and safe care to our patients. Following visits by the Care Quality Commission to both Ashford and St Peter’s hospitals we have no outstanding concerns and are fully compliant in all their standards. We have continued to score well against the majority of our quality and performance standards, including the 18 week and cancer waiting targets and are still reporting good infection control rates and low mortality rates. This year’s national inpatient survey shows good improvements for our hospitals for the third year running, and we were particularly pleased to see improvements in how patients rate the care given to them by our nursing staff.

We are also pleased to have had such good engagement from our stakeholders in developing our priorities for next year and in reflecting on this year’s achievements. Your input and insight is critical to helping us continue to provide the very best care we can for our patients. Thank you.


Ashford and St Peter’s Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust Quality Account 2012-2013 The information in this Quality Account is provided from our data management systems and our quality improvement systems and to the best of my knowledge is accurate, and provides a true reflection of our organisation.


Andrew Liles
Chief Executive


Previous Accounts

You can download previous years below:
 

Attachments:

File	File size
Trust Quality Accounts 2009-2010.pdf	1316 Kb
Trust Quality Accounts 2010-2011.pdf	388 Kb
Trust Quality Accounts 2011-2012.pdf	1266 Kb
Trust Quality Accounts 2012-2013.pdf	2299 Kb