COMMENTARIES

Clinical governance

Prescribing how NHS trusts "do" quality: a recipe for committees but little action?

P M Whitty

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr P M Whitty
Centre for Health Services Research, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 4HH, UK; p.m.whitty@ncl.ac.uk

---

The jury is still out as to whether the current clinical governance model is the best way to improve quality

---

Keywords: clinical governance; NHS trusts; quality improvement

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Clinical governance, together with a number of national bodies to support and monitor it, was established in the NHS in 1997.¹ Seven years on, it seems a good time to reflect on how effective this national quality assurance/improvement strategy has been, particularly in the light of subtle changes in the UK government’s attitude to quality. The recent publication of a new standards framework,² the replacement of the Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) with the Healthcare Commission from April 2004, and insistence that trusts will have greater local autonomy² all suggest a change in the wind—although the direction of the change is not quite clear.

In the initial guidance on the duty of NHS trusts to implement clinical governance,^3,4 the government set out the mandatory components of clinical governance (variously slightly modified since but broadly comprising clinical risk management, clinical audit, patient/service user involvement, education and training, clinical effectiveness . . . [Full text of this article]

CiteULike    Complore    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Article

Achieving progress through clinical governance? A national study of health care managers’ perceptions in the NHS in England

T Freeman and K Walshe
Qual. Saf. Health Care 2004 13: 335-343. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

This article has been cited by other articles:

• Hamblin, R. (2008). Regulation, measurements and incentives. The experience in the US and UK: does context matter?. The Journal of the Royal Society for the Promotion of Health 128: 291-298 [Abstract]