Best Quality Improvement Finalists' Showcase

Best Quality Improvement

Category proudly co-sponsored by:    

Recognising teams making measurable improvements to the quality and safety of health care.
Champion: Jane Smith, Deputy Editor, BMJ

Combined Stroke Unit (Ward 9) and Facilitated Discharge Team, Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, England
The stroke unit and facilitated discharge team redesigned its stroke service –which was already strong in rehabilitation – to ensure the rapid transfer of all people with suspected stroke to a specialist service offering immediate hyperacute assessment, urgent brain imaging, and 24 hour access to thrombolysis. To do this the team redesigned the service and created a single stroke unit on one site combining acute care, rehabilitation beds, and early supported discharge.

County Durham and Darlington Primary Care Trust, England
The primary care trust NHS County Durham has seen an average 8% rise in its prescribing expenditure since the late 1990s, and in 2007 its drug and therapeutics committee set a series of targets for drugs management within the Quality Outcomes Framework. Each of the 85 practices in its area had to choose three targets (preferably where their performance needed improving), and the trust’s pharmaceutical advisers then worked with each practice to help them audit and implement their improvements in prescribing.

Pressure Ulcer Prevention Project Team, Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board, Swansea
The team in Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University NHS Trust aimed to halve the incidence of pressure ulcers, but over the first 19 months no pressure ulcers occurred on the pilot ward, and similarly good results have been achieved as the project has been rolled out across other wards in their large university hospital.

Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland
The Society for Cardiothoracic Surgery in Great Britain and Ireland has pioneered the collection of accurate data on outcomes among patients undergoing surgery. It has put information on mortality rates in the public domain, developed risk stratification, adopted an approach to handling surgeons and units with outcomes lying outside the expected statistical boundaries, and reached a position where every surgeon member of the society completes and submits a detailed dataset for each patient undergoing cardiac surgery.