The East Midlands Quality Observatory - EMQO - will work to support the NHS in the East Midlands in delivering services which are safe, effective and have high levels of patient satisfaction. This requires that providers, commissioners, policy makers and the public have information to enable quality measurement, develop an understanding of how to use such information and act appropriately on it.
What EMQO does
How EMQO will support the East Midlands
Governance
What the future holds
What EMQO does
EMQO will provide insight into the quality of services across the East Midlands for the public and the local NHS, supporting organisations in delivering high quality services.
Domains of Quality
Quality is defined across three domains - clinical effectiveness, patient safety and patient experience. Potential extra domains, including equity, innovation and productivity or cost-effectiveness are considered within these domains . Delivering high quality care in new ways, more quickly, cheaply, and fairly are expected changes across all domains, but are not separable domains of quality.
Roles and Functions
The roles undertaken and functions delivered by EMQO need to enable users across the region to maximise benefits and use us to deliver the vision, supporting healthcare organisations to make evidence-based, robust decisions.
The roles and functions of EMQO need to reflect the varied needs of users and be established to allow development of its functionality as the organisation matures. Those identified as core requirements are:
-
Benchmarking and Intelligence
-
New indicator development
-
Interpretation and focussed reports
-
Early warning system
-
Data quality assessment/ assurance
-
Signposting
-
Assessment
How EMQO will support the East Midlands
EMQO will produce comparative benchmarking information as a core function. This allows organisations to understand where they stand relative to other organisations in the region and within the national set and peer group. Interpretation of this comparative information moves EMQO into acting as a performance variation and intelligence (PVI) function. There is clear linkage with the proposed early warning role (that identifies apparent change and anomaly early, at an organisational level, but also at a regional level through its ability to see all the regional information) and the roles of the county and regional clinical reference groups as assessors.
Initially EMQO will use the organisational level for comparison, but will move toward more granular benchmarking in general and in specific areas. This may be brought forwards rapidly.
EMQO will work with its users to develop new indicators, as appropriate. Their future inclusion in the data set will be agreed at a regional level. Indicator development will be based upon the principle of first using relevant existing indicators and minimising additional data collections and bureaucracy.
EMQO will not produce data without interpretation, its focus being on producing knowledge to inform decision makers rather than pushing out un-interpreted data. An agreed number of ad-hoc in-depth reports will be produced each year.
EMQO will provide early warning of apparent changes in key outcome areas by analysing the data flowing in the region, at an organisational and regional level, and identifying apparent changes and anomalies early on.
EMQO will provide some validation of data quality, though this is not its main function.
Governance
The ownership and governance of EMQO is of critical importance. It must be locally owned, locally led and deliver local value. This requires strong governance to ensure the correct balance between stakeholders’ input and maintaining effective and efficient delivery.
The key role that EMQO will provide is insight into the quality of services across the East Midlands for the public and the local NHS, supporting organisations and front line staff in delivering high quality services.
Therefore EMQO must be accountable to all the NHS organisations in the East Midlands, with the srategic health authority, primary care trusts and provider bodies included in the overall governance arrangements.
It is currently envisaged that EMQO will form part of EMPACT (East Midlands’ Procurement and Commissioning Transformation) once it has been established. The first phase currently sits within the governance structures of NHS East Midlands.
What the future holds
EMQO will continue to evolve. Phase 2 of the website will be created. This will involve taking on more roles as described above.
