The Midlands and East Quality Observatory (MEQO) have been working alongside the Strategic Projects Team to support the NHS Midlands and East Ambition to Create a Patient Revolution.

The Friends and Family Test was devised as the headline metric for the Ambition, as one of the mechanisms for systematically putting patient experience at the top of the region’s nursing and leadership agenda. Data returns for the inaugural month, April, have been received from nearly all, 44 out of 46, acute trusts across the Midlands and East and include the results from 21,245 inpatients within 48 hours of discharge from hospital. Please visit the East Midlands Quality Observatory (EMQO) website for further information.

launch resource >>

The Practice Quality Profile indicators came from a consultative process with GPs and PCT staff from across the West Midlands. It brings together indicators from various sources providing an indication of quality across the 5 domains of the NHS Outcomes Framework. A sixth domain has been created for the profile “Organisational approach to quality” which contains a number of metrics which look at organisational behaviour. The profiles therefore fit into both the new Commissioning architecture of the NHS and support the Patient Information Revolution by putting more information freely and transparently into the public domain. The latest Practice Profiles are available on the MEQO website.

launch resource >>

MEQO and Northeast Quality Observatory System have been working in partnership since May 2011 to create a suite of National Mental Health Profiles to support the Department of Health’s Foundation Trust pipeline process.

Working with mental health clinicians, the wider Quality Observatory network and a strategic Project Advisory Group of experts in the field, our team has identified a distinct set of indicators that reflects quality and which stimulates debate and investigation, shares learning and enables service improvement. The National Mental Health Quality Profiles can be found on the Quality Intelligence East (QIE) website.

launch resource >>

Produced by MEQO, the dashboard has been developed in liaison with SHA and trust medical directors and information departments, which has resulted in a set of robust indicators that are a strong reflection of quality. This open-source development approach provides users with clear methodology behind each indicator and allows NHS analysts to explore the data in more detail within their own organisation.  The latest dashboards can be downloaded from the East Midlands Quality Observatory website.

launch resource >>

SHMI is the new hospital-level indicator which uses standard and transparent methodology for reporting mortality at hospital level across the NHS in England. It has been developed following the recommendations of the hospital standardised mortality ratios (HSMR) review, which committed the Department of Health to implementing the SHMI as the single hospital-level indicator for the NHS. The data for the Midlands and East SHA Cluster and the rest of England is available on the Quality Intelligence East website, while a short briefing paper that explains SHMI in more detail, is available on the West Midlands QI website. In the short term, MEQO will continue to publish HSMR data 90 days after the end of each reporting quarter.

launch resource >>

Launching in summer 2012, INHALE will provide a single source of data on the burden of and quality of care for respiratory disease in England. This will be the first time that much of this data has been presented as an interactive atlas. It builds on the legacy of the Lung and Asthma Information Agency (LAIA), initiatives such as Impress, the 2008 Darzi Report ‘High Quality Care for All’ and the better availability of data in general, and has been developed by Quality Intelligence East.

Its focus is on accessible and actionable data that shows clinical variation, trends in disease patterns and quality of care, drawing on the wide range of datasets relevant to respiratory disease that are available from the NHS and elsewhere. INHALE was endorsed at the winter 2011 meeting of the British Thoracic Society where its membership expressed support for a national resource for the respiratory community within the changing NHS environment.

Midlands and East SHA has set itself the challenge of eliminating avoidable Grade 2, 3 & 4 pressure ulcers by December 2012.  It hopes to achieve this through the monitoring and tracking of performance of health care teams in Acute, Mental Health and Community Care Settings. MEQO will be conducting this analysis and will be producing monthly reports on performance to the SHA Pressure Ulcer Programme Board, SHA Performance Team and individual PCTs. Further information will be provided in due course.