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COMMENTARIES |
| Clinical governance |
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
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 governments 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 windalthough 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
Relevant Article
Qual. Saf. Health Care 2004 13: 335-343.
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