Looking forward for the best standard achievement

Clinical governance is one of the interesting topics to be discussed in millennium world. There are many countries in the world have started to establish and apply this concept to their hospital management. For this topic, I would share how UK NHS establish and apply this concept to their health system.
In order to discuss further about this topic, we should know the definition of clinical governance. Clinical governance is a powerful, new and comprehensive mechanism for ensuring that high standard of clinical of clinical care are maintained throughout the NHS and the quality of service is continuously improved.

Basically, in order to run this programme successfully, the clear elements must be developed and elaborated in more details. So that all people involved in service delivery understand clearly their role and responsibility. Elements included are risk management, openness, research and development, education and training, clinical audit and clinical effectiveness. 

There are two organizations that set the standard of care in UK. National Institute of Care Excellent sets the standard of care via wide consultation and research into the clinical effectiveness and cost effectiveness of the clinical practices. National Service Framework includes care target such as services for elderly and coronary heart disease.

Clinical governance is monitored by Commission for Health Improvement (CHI) by visiting the healthcare every four years and the individual review is made widely available. Other organization is NHS Regional Offices that is responsible for monitoring the implementation of the standards nationally as well as for monitoring the overseeing of the implementation of action plans. NHS Performance Assessment Framework is important to monitor the performance of individual organization so that we can compare between organizations. These organizations are required to produce annual report as well as planning for quality improvement for the following year. Annual surveys are also conducted to receive feedback from the patients and users’ experience.

References:

1. Zahir, K. 2001. Clinical Governance in the UK NHS. DFID Health System Resources Centre. UK.
2. Starey, N. 2001. What is Clinical Governance? (Volume 1, Number 12)