Quality is at the heart of everything we do at The Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust and all of our staff play a vital part in helping us to achieve safe, effective and patient-centred care.
Each year the Trust decides on its Quality Priorities. We then set targets on those priorities and publish whether we have achieved them in an Annual Quality Report. Any topic can be chosen BUT it has to be measurable and the data easily collected.
We set challenging quality objectives. We want to set ourselves on a path to exceed our internally set quality targets so that we will be recognised as the highest quality service provider in the region by patient groups, staff and other key stakeholders. We also want to ensure we are providing excellent care and services, making patients feel involved, valued and informed.
These objectives link into both our guiding principle as a healthcare provider and indeed the reason for our existence; to provide high quality care for all of our patients.
We believe it is being able to answer ‘yes’ to the following three questions:
We are working towards answering these questions positively and being able to demonstrate it transparently. We believe the quality of care is made up of these three elements but they cannot be measured in just one way. Therefore we use a number of measures, all of which add together to give an overall picture of what the organisation is achieving and where it still needs to improve. These are all included in the Annual Quality Report. In the last few years this has been published giving a full overview of the Trust’s quality of care on a number of measures, copies of which can be found here.