Experience on the front line

Accepted.
In respect of deficiencies wherever they come in the health and care system, the Department of Health needs to be explicitly and clearly on the side of patients and the public. We have put in place a number of measures to increase transparency in the NHS including the duty of candour on organisations, and the appointment of Chief Inspectors of Hospitals, Primary Care and Adult Social Care. These measures will help to identify poor practice, increase public accountability and, while for some the exposure of failings in care will be difficult, over the long-term we expect these measures will increase public trust in health and care organisations.

A number of measures are in place to increase transparency in the NHS around deficiencies in care including the duty of candour on organisations, a national learning from deaths policy (with public reporting on deaths thought to be due to problems in care), publication of reported patient safety incidents, the Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF) and CQC inspection reports. These increase public and patient accountability.

Further, the National Clinical Audit and Patient Outcomes Programme (NCAPOP) audits are commissioned and managed on behalf of NHS England by the Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP). The programme comprises more than 30 national audits related to some of the most commonly-occurring conditions. These collect and analyse data supplied by local clinicians to provide a national picture of care standards for that specific condition. On a local level, NCAPOP audits provide local trusts with individual benchmarked reports on their compliance and performance, feeding back comparative findings to help participants identify necessary improvements for patients. As well as the 30-plus national clinical audits, NCAPOP also encompasses the four Clinical Outcome Review Programmes (CORP). These help assess the quality of healthcare and stimulate improvement by enabling clinicians, managers and policy makers to learn from adverse events and other relevant data

The Department and the national organisations for the NHS have continued to put in place a number of measures to ensure that there is widespread transparency for patients and the public. The ‘my NHS’ website is providing more detailed, comparative information for patients and the public than ever before. The duty of candour will form part of the Fundamental Standards, and comes into force for NHS bodies in November 2014 and apply to all providers of health and care services registered by the Care Quality Commission from April 2015.

This recommendation was accepted by the Government.

In the January 2014 Hard Truths report, the Government referred to the various measures it had put in place to increase transparency in the NHS, including the duty of candour.