The Deming cycle of the Plan Do Study Act is the core approach that is used most in Quality Improvement and continuous improvement efforts within the NHS.

But for most staff, this requires using a hodgepodge of paper plans, spreadsheets for data and KPI, emails, meetings and presentations, creating action and project plans and to-do lists and, less often, impact assessments and further cycles of the same complexity.

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No wonder QI is seldom as successful as planned.

What would be ideal is an off-the-shelf digital solution that supports all of these steps and could bring in our key quality information, including Care Quality Commission self-assessment and evidence, ward accreditation, our compliance to existing policies, NICE Guidance and clinical assessment services, our quality metrics and KPIs and even our incident and clinical audit information.

This would provide the triangulated information we need to see where quality issues are really arising and having the worst impact on outcomes and where we should focus our QI effort.

With integrated capture of our notes on the situation and conversations, easy in-depth visual analysis to evaluate and corroborate our thinking and the ability to create action plans and project plans directly linked to the measures that tell us whether what we are seeking to improve is improving.

This is what InPhase set out to create with its Oversight application, developed continuously for more than 10 years.

Oversight expanded over the years, starting with objectives and outcomes impacts, KPI, SPC performance trends and forecasting, to action management and then CQC, NICE, CAS and audit.

Continuous improvement is both a result and a circular driver of the care quality culture that the NHS aspires to attain

With the change this year from NRLS to LFPSE for incidents, InPhase has collaborated with NHS England and added easy-to-use LFPSE incident capture with Fast Forms to minimise clinician time taken, automated reporting to NHSE and replacing STEIS and supporting PSIRF, and of course, triangulating the data for local trust analysis and PDSA improvement.

Continuous improvement is both a result and a circular driver of the care quality culture that the NHS aspires to attain.

Is there any evidence that a single oversight approach to support QI and PDSA works in practice? What cultural impacts and what quality improvements have its early adopters seen?

Wirral Community Health and Care Foundation Trust selected the system for a new governance framework, uniting all divisions within the organisation under the same standard of care and supporting improvement.

Paula Simpson, director of nursing and quality improvement at Wirral, is a convert. “There has been a rapid really positive impact on culture within the trust as a result of using InPhase Oversight and I have to say that was quite unexpected, it wasn’t something that we had particularly expected to happen quite so quickly.”

Improvements were also rapidly forthcoming, with one of the first being a 30 per cent improvement in hand hygiene audits achieving 95 per cent completion within weeks of adopting the system.

At Circle Health Group, now with 52 hospitals since the BMI integration, the improvement evidence has also been impressive. Oversight went into use just as Circle integrated the BMI hospitals.

More than 40 of the hospitals since the integration two years ago have achieved improved CQC ratings.

Cody Long, head of quality assurance and assessment during the integration of the estates, is another advocate of the system and the company. “One of the key elements for us was the responsiveness from the InPhase team. Sometimes they made changes literally overnight. We would email one evening and it was done by the next morning, the response from the team has been fantastic, I really can’t ask for more.”

It may be a tall order to take on the whole PDSA cycle in a single product, as well as taking on the long-standing providers of risk and audit systems in the NHS, but coming afresh from the direction of continuous improvement, Oversight is winning customers and turning them into advocates.

For more on Oversight from InPhase for quality, audit, incidents and continuous performance improvement, click here.