Hospitals boss makes new year pledge to ‘raise the bar on quality’ for patients

Dr Gillian Fairfield

Dr Gillian Fairfield, the Chief Executive of The Pennine Acute Hospitals NHS Trust, has unveiled a new high priority ten point action plan to make an immediate impact and improvement on the quality of services it provides to patients and their families.

‘Raising the bar on quality’, led by the Trust’s Chief Executive and Chief Nurse, sets out what the Trust’s 9,000 staff, who work across its hospitals and community services, can do now to make the Trust and its services the best they can possibly be for staff and patients.

Dr Fairfield has rolled out the plan as part of her vision for the Trust to become a quality-driven provider of healthcare by improving services, clinical effectiveness and patient experience.

The ten point quality plan has been shaped by the views and ideas from Trust staff over the past few weeks following Dr Fairfield’s Pride in Pennine Chief Executive Challenge involving online workshops and staff engagement forums, which have become a feature at the Trust since she joined on 1 April 2014.

The Trust’s new 10 high priority quality actions for all staff are:

1. Standardise the environment
2. Standardise operations
3. Make sure all our services are clean and safe
4. Ensure we adhere to clinical standards
5. Accelerate our focus on dementia
6. Focus on care and compassion
7. Improve and standardise our documentation
8. Have the right numbers of staff in the right place
9. Train and develop our staff
10. Improve our communication with patients, families and staff

Dr Fairfield said: “In my first year at the Trust, together with our staff we developed the vision and values which bind us together – at all times we want to be Quality Drive, Responsible and Compassionate. We have also systematically reviewed all of our governance and quality systems and processes, and we have a new leadership team in place.

“We are now accelerating our Quality journey. Raising the bar on a quality’ is particularly dear to my heart and Pennine Acute Trust and everyone who works here is on a journey to continually drive up our quality to provide the very best and safest care we can. 

"Our new ten point quality plan sets out the important day to day operational quality priorities that all of our staff can subscribe to and champion to help raise the bar on quality for our patients and for each other. It is a minimum by which our patients and their families expect and deserve.”