Secondary Care
Case study: North Bristol NHS Trust
From Ward to Board Level
Revolutionising Quality Governance: North Bristol NHS Trust’s Partnership with Radar Healthcare
The Challenge:
North Bristol NHS Trust (NBT) has partnered with Radar Healthcare to enhance their quality governance processes, aiming to provide their busy clinical teams with a comprehensive overview of different processes and learning opportunities in one centralised platform. Before joining Radar Healthcare, NBT relied on disparate systems and Excel spreadsheets, operating in silos, making clear oversight of risk, quality, and governance activities within the Trust challenging.
The Solution:
The team appointed Radar Healthcare as the solution to connect the dots, consolidate audits, incidents, complaints, positive compliments, and frameworks such as Freedom to Speak Up. A key principle was that the system could continue to grow and accommodate more workflows in the future beyond the initial plan. This was essential to those delivering clinical care to improve and understand the quality of care they provide.
From ward to board level, the objective was to deliver timely information on safety and quality, enabling informed decisions and targeted support. The system is being deployed across the trust and also encompasses a range of clinical and non-clinical locations outside of the ward environment. The final piece of the jigsaw involved providing evidence to the CQC and the other regulators, showcasing their commitment to action, improvement and excellence.
As part of the implementations, Radar Healthcare will allow NBT to integrate data in the future from multiple third-party systems, including their mortality database and Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system. This will enable a reduction in manual data extraction, reduce the administration for clinicians and give greater oversight of all governance and quality assurance processes across the entire Trust.
"It helps us develop a culture of safety, it helps us in real time getting data to learn lessons in quick cycles and build up a story of proof."
Summary of Success:
Significant increase in audit completion and compliance
“We have nearly reached 90% monthly completion for all of our locations who are undertaking their audits on Radar Healthcare without any problems at all. Audit compliance has also improved since the Radar Healthcare launch from 55-60% to 80%. So both completion and compliance has increased significantly.” Juliette Hughes, Deputy Chief Nurse, North Bristol NHS Trust.
Meaningful ‘quality audits’ with increased visibility
With Radar Healthcare, clinical, frontline and leadership teams now have oversight of the audits, their impact across the Trust, outstanding action plans, and feedback following the completion of an audit. “If we understand what's going on, we've got insight. If we've got insight, we can actually focus our improvement. And that's what we really want to use Radar Healthcare for.” Paul Cresswell, Director of Quality Governance, North Bristol NHS Trust.
Consolidation of multiple systems for the first time
With the future plan to bring together data from audits, incidents, complaints and litigation, everything will be visible in one single system. This will provide greater insight and give teams the capability to gather real intelligence. “It will give us the opportunity, for the first time to get some real intelligence and insight into the cross virtualisation of some of these data streams.” Melanie De Witt, Chief Nursing Information Officer, North Bristol Trust
Learning and improving patient care with real-time data
This facilitates quick learning cycles and the development of a continuous improvement story, fostering a culture of safety and quality care. “Radar Healthcare helps us to develop a culture of safety. It helps us in real time getting data so we can learn lessons in quick cycles and then develop a story of improvement and that's what we're looking forward to.” Sanjoy Shah, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, North Bristol NHS Trust
Better accountability of care provision
Insight into the care provision is now determined by insights through Radar Healthcare ensuring a greater transparency and accuracy. “The Radar Healthcare system is the mechanism by which we can use the tool to really answer that question “are we providing good care?” Steve Hams, Chief Nursing Officer, North Bristol NHS Trust
Timesaving through streamlined processes
One of the greatest challenges faced by frontline leaders is managing the overwhelming number of actions that arise from various sources such as complaints responses, incidents, and improvement initiatives. Keeping track of all these actions can quickly become a daunting task. “With Radar Healthcare, it will be possible to have a single action list that links to all of the relevant events, and you're able to keep track of it and see it on your dashboard and know how you progressing it and report it effectively. So that's going to be such a timesaver and such an opportunity to improve quality of care.” Melanie De Witt, Chief Nursing Information Officer, North Bristol NHS Trust
Paperless learning for improved sustainability
“So we are raising the bar at every level and we have to get into a world where we are learning in a paperless manner for sustainability, but as well as in terms of accuracy and promptness of response. We have to work with the digital platforms, innovate with digital platforms so that those lessons are embedded and we continue to get better.” Sanjoy Shah, Deputy Chief Medical Officer, North Bristol NHS Trust
Benchmarking
NBT actively participates in Radar Healthcare’s Community Forum and user groups, sharing ideas and good practices, aiding in benchmarking against other NHS Trusts.
Inside North Bristol NHS Trust: Exclusive Interviews on the Radar Healthcare Partnership
Explore short interviews with North Bristol NHS Trust’s team, including the Director of Quality Governance, Systems Managers, Chief Nurse, and Chief Nursing Officer.
These interviews highlight Radar Healthcare’s transformative impact on streamlining diverse healthcare systems into a single platform, enabling comprehensive data comparison. Learn how this partnership benefits from ward to board level, fostering evidence-based decision-making, meaningful conversations, and improved patient care.
Watch the interviews hereA responsive framework together so we can see everything in one place
Paul Cresswell, Director of Quality Governance, shared insights into the selection process, stating, “We were really keen to look for something in terms of software that was going to help us connect all sorts of different quality governance processes that exist in the NHS. One of the things in my various roles over the past few years that I’ve found really challenging is helping clinical teams to see a picture of all of these different processes in one place.”
He emphasised the importance of having a unified platform, expressing a desire for people to embrace and work seamlessly with the system. Paul highlights the significance of value for money, saving time for busy clinical teams, and utilising analytics at a trust level to make informed choices, track progress, and celebrate success within governance processes.
Audit insight from ward to board level
Having recently gone live with the Audits Management module within Radar Healthcare, Jenny Booth, the Quality Governance Systems Manager at NBT highlighted the process they went through to make it as easy as possible for staff: “We want to make it simple for them to use and easily accessible for them to use on a number of devices so they can log in from a computer, but they can also use an iPad and walk around and do their audits and start working.”
She continued: “There’s been a lot of digital change that the end users have had to deal with within the trust. We absolutely didn’t want to give them anything that wasn’t going to be fit for purpose and right first time. But as simple as possible. So, it was really important that it was right and that it was accurate. We worked very closely with Radar Healthcare to make sure any changes needed to be made.”
Juliette Hughes, Deputy Chief Nurse, continues to explain how this oversight will help from ward to board level, Radar brings an exciting opportunity for our systems to communicate with one another, allowing us to examine the overall patient experience and care quality.
Through the integration of safeguarding and patient safety modules, we can gather important feedback and use this information to measure the quality of care at the ward level. This enables ward and location leaders to assess their own performance, while also allowing Matrons, Divisional Directors of Nursing, and Clinical Directors to monitor performance across multiple areas. “So up to board level, we really have a triangulated assurance process where we’re using quality to measure the success of what we’re delivering.”
Reflecting on NBT’s Collaborative Journey with Radar Healthcare
Partnership working has been integral to the successful implementation of Radar Healthcare within NBT, demanding joint efforts from both sides to ensure its effectiveness and continuous evolution.
Paul Cresswell, Director of Quality Governance commented: “The chosen system represents a developmental opportunity to keep growing and expanding what it covers and also the way that the partnership working with Radar Healthcare operates helps us have confidence really, that that’s possible for the future.”
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