Since CHKS were awarded the contract to work with five Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Trusts and the regional Northern Ireland Health and Social Care Board last year, these new partnerships have presented some exciting prospects both for the individual trusts and for the wider health service.
Over the next few years, CHKS will work closely with the regional board to develop benchmarking and performance monitoring capabilities across Northern Ireland. This will help the board pinpoint areas of good and bad performance, allowing them to take an efficient and proactive approach to improving services.
If you are familiar with iCompare you will know that it allows you to create your own dashboards and performance indicators, providing a vital evidence base that can be used to develop effective projects and improvement programmes. It also provides assurance that organisations are delivering the best and safest care possible.
iCompare is also facilitating sustainable improvement by enabling each service within an organisation to create a baseline, defining what excellence looks like, against which they can measure their service performance. The measurements span a range of comparative metrics in safety, effectiveness and experience.
CHKS are already undertaking exciting work with Belfast Health and Social Care Trust, helping it drive forward its ambition to reach the top 20 per cent of high-performing trusts by 2020. We view our work with trusts as a partnership, and Belfast is seeing the benefits of this as we develop the system according to their specific needs following the restructuring and the implementation of a collective leadership model.
The way that trusts in Northern Ireland are structured, with community care part of their core service provision, means that there will be the opportunity for CHKS to improve access and use of community healthcare data, too. This is important because it creates a more holistic vision of the care journey that patients embark on and can highlight variation in performance and outcomes across the system.
