Quality Accounts 2018
What are Quality Accounts?
A Quality Account is a report produced by NHS healthcare providers, detailing the quality of their services. It is an important way for local NHS services to report on the quality and show improvements to local communities and stakeholders. You can find out more about Quality Accounts here.
What happens at Health Scrutiny?
This is when members of the Council scrutinise the overall quality of service provided by an NHS Health Care provider using information from the providers’ Quality Accounts. These Quality Accounts are published annually by each service and are available to the public. Services being scrutinised were:
- East & North Herts Hospital Trust
- West Herts Hospital Trust
- Princes Alexandra Hospital Trust
- East of England Ambulance Trust
- Herts Partnership Foundation Trust
- Herts Community Trust
In addition to the information provided by the Quality Accounts, the Council also rely on information from others sources, including in-depth knowledge provided by Healthwatch Hertfordshire. To provide this information the Council members were assisted by various Healthwatch Hertfordshire representatives.
Each provider attended a separate session, with senior representatives from each organisation, council members, and a Healthwatch Hertfordshire Representative. The providers are then scrutinised, which meant they are asked about their submitted reports, allowing members and the Healthwatch Hertfordshire Representative to better understand the key challenges and improvements that have been made over the previous year, and commitments going into the next.
The findings
Overall there were lots of positives raised, as well as recommendations for improvement put forward. We were also impressed by the general openness of the trusts’ officers, as well as the hard work and commitment in a continuingly difficult environment.
The minutes of the scrutiny meeting will be available through the County Council soon, and the Quality Accounts are due to be published in July.
If you want to read any of them, they can be accessed through the specific trust you are interested in using the links below:
East and North Herts Hospital Trust
Princess Alexandra Hospital Trust
East of England Ambulance Trust
