Programme

Registration and refreshments

Opening remarks from the Chair

Developing an effective framework to deliver nursing quality

• Do we really understand what quality means? Do our teams?
• What impact can nurses have on the three domains of quality?
• The effectiveness of care
• The safety of care
• The patient experience of care
• Clarifying the importance of high quality care in the delivery of NHS cost effectiveness – how quality improves productivity by getting it right first time, every time
• The crucial role of leadership for quality at all levels – from ward to board
• Moving the focus from acute services to whole pathways, mental health and community based care
• Delivering practical improvement – using quality frameworks to deliver tangible improvement on the ground
• Changing nursing mindsets and culture - helping nurses to recognise for themselves the need to measure and evidence the quality of the care they provide

Developing and using nursing metrics and quality indicators

• Understanding what truly measures and captures the quality of nursing care
• Encouraging nursing teams to identify and develop their own indicators for quality of care
• How do the national clinical Indicators for Quality Improvement (IQI) relate to nurses and nursing and what are the nurse specific indicators
• Exploring the value of locally developed measures against nationally determined measures - balancing the need for benchmarking and comparability with the need for local engagement
• Firmly linking the collection of data and measurement with the improvement of care – ensuring that nurses see results and understand the purpose of measurement

Moving from process measures to outcome measures

• What is the evidence that measuring processes actually improves the quality of care provided – Do good processes lead to good outcomes?
• Understanding that process measurement provides a way of kick-starting a culture of quality measurement
• Creating more sophisticated measures which better reflect both patient experience and outcome
• Developing patient outcome related measures of nursing quality

Question and answer session

Morning refreshments

Assuring the quality of nursing care – developing mechanisms to demonstrate to patients, boards, commissioners and regulators that you are delivering optimal care

• Following the incidents at Mid Staffs, what should be on Board agendas around nursing quality
• What do Boards require from nursing in order to provide assurance?
• Developing clinical dashboards to provide real time assurance around the quality of nursing care
• Integrating real time patient feedback into the nursing assurance process
• What will Quality Accounts and Quality Reports look like and how will they provide assurance
• Including nursing measures in Quality Accounts
• Providing real time information about the quality of nursing care to patients and public
• Hearing from frontline staff – using the tools on the ground to change practice

Developing the workforce to enable the delivery of quality nursing care

• Clarifying the role of commissioning in driving up the quality of care services
• Addressing quality through commissioning and contracting - developing quality specifications in service contracts
• Demystifying the Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) payment framework and making it real for nurses –
• Which CQUINs are you being measured against?
• How can you work with commissioners to influence this?
• Working in partnership with providers to address quality – coming to agreements about what good looks like on your patch
• Requiring providers to develop measures which evidence their quality of care
• Addressing the quality of care across whole pathways of care rather than in just one setting
• Encouraging nurses to engage with commissioners to influence service innovation
• Learning after an event – ensuring that incidents of low quality care lead to learning and improvement

Question and answer session

Lunch

Understanding the patient experience of care

Dignity, compassion and caring in nursing

• What is compassion?
• What are the key elements of compassionate care?
• What are the challenges to compassion and caring in today's nursing practice?
• What are the potential ways forward to address these challenges?
  

Question and answer session

Afternoon refreshments

Transforming the quality of care in the community

• Using a quality improvement model for care homes to tackle Healthcare Associated Infections
• Collaborative Method - A specific, simple approach, focused on making rapid sustainable improvement in service provision.
• Transferable improvement model for acute and community sectors
• Importance of a whole heath economy approach
• Using measures to track and drive improvement

Exploring nursing skill mix and its impact on the quality, innovation and productivity agenda

• Do more nurses equal higher quality care? Exploring evidence linking low nurse numbers with increased Hospital Standardised Mortality Rate (HSMR)
• Is there an optimal skill mix and nurse-patient ratio for high quality nursing care?
• Maintaining the quality and safety of care by ensuring the competence of unregistered staff to deliver increasingly complex care
• Developing national standards for HCA and support worker practice
• What are the likely impacts of changes to nursing education and development pathways on the future quality of nursing care?
• The business case for maintaining nurse number and focusing on quality in times of financial uncertainly

Question and answer session

Close of conference