A Quality Account is a report about the quality of services provided by an NHS healthcare service. The report is published annually by each NHS healthcare provider and made available to the public.
How is the ‘quality’ of the services provided defined?
Healthcare providers have measured the quality of the services they provide by looking at:
- patient safety
- the effectiveness of treatments that patients receive
- patient feedback about the care provided
What information can be found in your NHS healthcare provider’s Quality Account?
All healthcare providers will have to answer a questionnaire in relation to the quality of healthcare they provide and give a detailed statement about the quality of their services.
Every Quality Account will include:
- A signed statement from the most senior manager of the organisation. Managers will describe the quality of healthcare provided by the organisation that they are responsible for. Within this statement senior managers should declare that they have seen the Quality Account and that they are happy with the accuracy of the data reported, are aware of the quality of the NHS services they provide, and understand where the organisation needs to improve the services it delivers. The statement is also an acknowledgement of any issues in the quality of services currently provided.
- Answers to a series of questions that all healthcare organisations will have to provide. This includes information on how the healthcare provider goes about measuring how well it is doing, continuously improving the services it provides and how it responds to checks made by regulators such as the Care Quality Commission (CQC). Guidance on how to answer each question is given to all providers to ensure the questions are answered in the same way. (Find more detail in the section Information about the questions asked).
- A statement from the organisation detailing the quality of the services they provide. Clinical teams, managers, patients and patient groups may all have had a role in choosing what to write about in this section, depending on what is important to the organisation and to the local community. At the end of each Quality Account you will find a statement from the provider’s main commissioner (buyer of their NHS services) on what they think of the provider’s Quality Account.
- You may also find statements from Local Involvement Networks (LINks) and the Overview and Scrutiny Committee (OSC). These groups represent patients and the public on healthcare issues.
