Darent Valley Hospital - DGT - Quality Strategy

Delivering the Quality Strategy

Governance Whilst it is important to have an open and transparent organisational culture, maintaining confidentiality and the security of patient information is extremely important. The Trust has the following measures in place to protect patient’s data: • T he Trust has a Caldicot Guardian, the Medical Director, who is responsible for protecting the confidentiality of people’s health and care information and making sure that it is used properly. • A ll Freedom of Information Requests are responded to within the agreed timeframes and are reviewed by the governance team (and, when appropriate, the Caldicott Guardian) to ensure that only appropriate data and information is shared and never patient identifiable data. • W e have information sharing agreements in place with all of our partner organisations, and share encrypted patient information through agreed systems and secure connections to enable clinical decisions to be made. • T he Trust is also committed to remaining compliant with General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Duty of Candour means that NHS organisations have a legal duty to inform and apologise to patients if mistakes have been made in the delivery of their care or treatment, or where moderate or severe harm has been caused. The Trust’s clinical governance team support staff in informing and apologising to patients, making sure that we always follow the CQC advice and Regulation 20 requirements. We try our best to get things right, but sometimes mistakes happen. When they do, it is vitally important to put things right as soon as possible, and to ensure that the same mistakes do not happen again. Receiving compliments and complaints is important for ensuring good quality healthcare – helping us to find out more about what we are getting right, and what we can improve. Duty of Candour, Complaints and Compliments

We have a Patient Advice and Liaison (PALS) team that offer advice and support to patients and their relatives; they seek to resolve day-to- day problems, address concerns that patients or visitors have about their visit to the hospital and advise on who to contact for help on a variety of issues. All of our complaints are processed in line with the Local Authority, Social Services and NHS (Complaints) Regulations 2009. The ‘National Patient Safety Strategy: safer culture, safer systems, safer patients’ (2019) sets the direction for the NHS to improve the insight into patient safety, through data and the involvement of patients and staff, to deliver sustainable improvement to patients’ safety. Taking this forward, we aim to better understand what is happening in our services by recording and analysing data, to give us greater insight into why something is not working as effectively as it should be, and to inform decision making on what improvements can be made. In doing so, we will continue to use the National Patient SafetyThermometer and will be adopting the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework, when published in 2021. We also continue to focus on consent, five steps to safer surgery, National Safety Standards for Invasive Procedures, Getting it Right First Time and our infection prevention and control measures. Each Trust Board member has an ‘adopted’ clinical and non-clinical area to support meaningful ‘Ward to Board’ relationships and dialogue. This supports an open and transparent culture and makes sure our Board regularly sees the quality of the clinical care we provide. Patient Safety Learning from our mistakes; complaints; patient visitors and staff experiences; as well as data, is vital to driving a continuous quality improvement culture and delivering changes that are noticeable to our patients, visitors and staff on a daily basis. We will increase our focus on reviewing the impact of our action plans developed in response to times when care has not been outstanding. Learning

27

Trust Strategy Summary