Quality Accounts

High Quality Care for All introduces Quality Accounts as a mechanism for public reporting on quality. It states that:

"we will require, in legislation, healthcare providers working for or on behalf of the NHS to publish their Quality Accounts from April 2010, just as they publish financial accounts. These will be reports to the public on the quality of services they provide in every service line, looking at safety, experience and outcomes."
NHS Next Stage Review Final Report. DH June 2008.

Echotech is already able to provide Quality Accounts (as of Jan 2009) based on a set of key performance quality indicators.

Our database (EchoNet) allows the submission of Quality Accounts for any one or more given contracts and time frame.

It is expected that our current measures will develop further over the forthcoming months until such a time, our Quality Accounts represent a complete and comprehensive picture of the quality of our service.

The purpose of Quality Accounts should be to enable provider organisations to focus on quality improvement as a core function.

To ensure that Quality Accounts can achieve this, they should contain information that is:

• A truthful and fair picture of the quality of services provided
• Meaningful and relevant to users of Quality Accounts
• Designed to allow for comparisons to be made
• Produced in a timely fashion and
• Published in a way which promotes easy access for users

Current thinking is that the greater part of each Quality Account will be locally determined to ensure that providers are able to publish information against the strategic priorities they have identified for improvement.

The intention is that these areas will be determined during the Measurement for Improvement process.

There will also be a core of nationally consistent information in all Quality Accounts. This is likely to include:

• Information on quality that providers supply to the Care Quality Commission for performance assessment and registration purposes
• Information on quality indicators that a provider may need to supply to their PCT under the contract they have with that PCT (including any information they need to supply to their PCT for CQUIN purposes)