Improving quality and effectiveness
There have been some notable areas of good practice and improvement in relation to the quality and effectiveness of care and services provided in England and Wales during 2006/2007.
Healthcare standards
Heart conditions
Cancer services
Maternity services
Our recommendations
Healthcare Standards
Our assessments show there has been improvement in the NHS over the past year, with more NHS organisations receiving a score of "excellent" for the quality of their services and more meeting basic core standards.
Standards in the independent sector have also improved considerably over the past year, however more improvement is still required in the independent mental heath sector.
Heart conditions
More people with a suspected heart attack are gaining access to clot busting drugs and primary angioplasty. The prescription of heart failure prevention medication, such as aspirin, continues to exceed targets. The proportion of patients being managed under the care of a cardiologist is improving. Survival rates for bypass operations is higher than expected and for aortic valve operations, is within the expected range. This is all very good news.
Cancer services
Despite improvements in access to cancer services, audits sponsored by the Healthcare Commission show that there is still wide variation is the level of care offered to patients. For example, some are not yet being treated by multidisciplinary teams and this may affect outcomes.
Maternity services
Our review of maternity services in England publishes early in 2008.
In Wales maternity services were generally delivered in a safe and effective way, however more women could benefit by being cared for within the clinical pathway for normal labour. Some trusts had shortfalls in consultant obstetrician cover and that trusts needed to strengthen the implementation of their policies for when there was an increase in activity or a reduction in staffing levels.
Our recommendations
We recommend that healthcare providers in both the independent sector and NHS do more to assess the quality of their services against other similar organisations through benchmarking and audit.
At a national level, there needs to be agreement on which information is important, and information should be published on a national comparative basis.
Download the chapter Improving quality and effectiveness (PDF 292kb) (Opens new window)
Download the State of Healthcare 2007 report (PDF 1510kb) (Opens new window)
