Quality indicators for primary care out-of-hours services
These indicators apply to a number of providers of primary care
out-of-hours services. Namely:
- All territorial NHS boards in Scotland
- NHS 24, where its service interfaces with primary care
out-of-hours services, and
- All primary care out-of-hours services whether directly
provided by an NHS board or secured on behalf of the NHS
board.
And importantly, they apply to you, the patient, who use primary
care out-of-hours services throughout Scotland.
The focus of the indicators is given to:
- Response times
- Accuracy of triage for home visits
- Effective information exchange
- Implementation of national clinical standards and
guidelines
- Antimicrobial prescribing, and
- Patient experience.
Indicators are tools for quality improvement and in themselves
do not provide definitive answers; rather these out-of-hours
indicators are designed to identify areas of good practice or
potential problems that might need addressing, usually demonstrated
by statistical outliers or variations within data results. They
should be used to assess, compare and determine the potential to
improve care. Using these indicators, NHS boards can trend the data
over time and benchmark with peers. These out-of-hours indicators
accompany and augment the existing Standards for The Provision
of Safe and Effective Primary Medical Services
Out-of-Hours.
To aid this drive for improvement, a driver
diagram, which identifies key components of out-of-hours care, is
provided in the indicators document. Both this, and suggested
change concepts and ideas, can be applied by providers of primary
care out-of-hours services for the purpose of specific improvement
effort on areas of priority within their local service.
Next steps
The next phase of the project will be to establish
implementation support across NHSScotland. This will lead to
further testing of supporting data and the identification of change
packages. The output of this phase will be an established
measurement plan, capturing reliable data across all the NHS
boards. This will, ultimately, lead to data being made available
across Scotland to support improvement, performance management and
governance.
In collaboration with Scottish Government and primary care
out-of-hours services, Healthcare Improvement Scotland will also
undertake further work to specifically identify quality indicators
relating to the management of patients with end-of-life or
palliative care needs.
Supporting the NHSScotland Quality Ambition
"The most appropriate treatments, interventions, support and
services will be provided at the right time to everyone who will
benefit, and wasteful or harmful variation will be
eradicated."
Supporting the Healthcare Improvement Scotland Strategic
Objective
"Support innovation and improvement in the delivery of
high quality healthcare planned and designed with the patients,
their families and the public at the centre of everything we
do."
Published Date: 4 July 2012
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