What is good governance and why is it important?

We recently hosted our second webinar as part of our quarterly Spotlight on Quality series.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to our three wonderful speakers:

• Melanie Roberts - Chief Nurse from Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS Trust
• Professor Jane Cummings CBE RN. - Former Chief Nurse of NHS England
• Carrie Marr - Former Director of Clinical Excellence Commission

The spotlight for this session focused on governance as our speakers talked about their experiences and approaches to the importance of good governance. Each sharing their personal experiences with what good governance looks like and the importance of it.

During the webinar we discussed these three key aspects:

International Focus on Governance for Safety and Quality

Carrie Marr spoke about the importance of prioritising safety and quality above all else​. In order to build your governance structure, you have to listen to your patients, families and communities and partner with them in planning and improving care​. Then you begin to work to pursue high quality care as a partnership between leadership and front-line staff. The key is to know how the key outcomes of your services compare to similar organisations which then allows you to plan for and monitor improvement in your organisation over time with meaningful data.

How might you as a leader, build on your current maturity and readiness for reliability and safety in your organisation?

Good governance makes it really difficult to do the wrong things and really easy to do the right thing

Andrew Corbett-Nolan CEO of Good Governance Institute

What does Governance mean for the NHS in England?

Quality is a philosophy: While we organise ourselves through providers, commissioners or groups to deliver assurance and improvement, the key to enabling success of the philosophy is through culture, leadership and good governance.

Professor Jane Cummings CBE RN. focused on how to do the right things whilst gaining more than just reassurance. Jane highlighted the importance of routinely and systematically sharing and triangulating intelligence, insight and learning on quality matters across the ICS. This allows your organisation to have a streamlined process when it comes to quality improvement, quality control and​ quality assurance.​ The easiest way to achieve good governance is to think of assurance as pathways and design your systems to enable people to focus on quality whilst holding each other to account.

Good Governance ‘A Trust Level Experience’

Melanie shared her experience and governance journey at Sandwell and West Birmingham NHS FT. They found a lack of assurance framework for patient safety across the Trust; including no service level performance measures or clear patient strategy. That is where Tendable stepped in, with the development of inspection types, agreed at corporate level with reflected key areas of risk. ​They had developed nine inspection types throughout the organisation, aligned with the fundamentals of care.​

This allowed front-line staff and leadership to have ownership by the clinical groups key – audit results driving quality improvement. The data from Tendable was then used as part of the clinical group assurance framework to confirm and challenge processes from clinical area through to group governance boards and executive review. The triangulation of audit results with the data empowered the front-line teams to identify areas that needed in-depth support.

If you would like to discuss how to introduce a strong governance process into your organisation then reach out to our team at [email protected].

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Our next webinar will be in the New Year, keep an eye out for further details and join us on our next spotlight on quality.