[Music] welcome to today's video All About clinical governance now this is an excellent topic suggested by one of our viewers Kim Sue as it's a term that's thrown around a lot within clinical environments in a variety of contexts and yet as medical students we never really taught what this means so hopefully this video will help you understand what exactly clinical governance is and how to use the term appropriately something that's very effective in interviews and in order to do this I'm going to present you with the commonly used definition and then break down the definition
before exploring the components in Greater detail now the most commonly cited definition is a framework through which NHS organizations are accountable for continually improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of Care by creating an environment in which excellence and clinical care will flourish now to the uninitiated this Probably sounds like a very fluffy definition that doesn't mean very much but by focusing on the key phrases highlighted in red hopefully you'll become a bit clearer so let's revisit clinical governance is a framework or a set of processes which are all about improving the
quality of care and maintaining the high quality or safeguarding the high standards of care and the theory is any organization that employs these processes will create environment in which Excellence automatically happens or flourishes so the obvious question is what are these processes and these processes can be grouped into six different types all of which impact on patient care in one way or another which is why patient care is at the center of this model and these processes are audit research clinical Effectiveness teaching risk management and openness and transparency and let's explore each of these in
a bit more detail so starting off with audit audit is all about comparing the practice of a given Department in relationship to guidelines so guidelines Define what Excellence is in the given situation and we're trying to measure how closely we adhere to these guidelines and therefore how excellent our care is so for example nice might nice might recommend a guideline whereby all patients should receive VTE assessments within 72 hours of admission and we might then perform order to see how many of our patients actually do receive these VTE assessments before trying to figure out ways
on how we can improve the rate of which patients are being assessed and therefore improve the standard of our patient care research on the other hand is all about trying to Define what is the best patient care in a given situation and by performing research in an ethical way according to research governance principles we can improve patient care clinical Effectiveness is all about weighing up the cost of intervention against the benefits now as we know the NHS is run on a limited budget and therefore we must make sure that all of the interventions we provide
are of excellent value for money and by evaluating the benefit of a cost of a intervention against the cost we're able to see which are the most effective and therefore H decide on the interventions that provide the best best care for as many patients as possible within our budget teaching is very important both personally and for juniors as we know medicine is a highly evolving and dynamic environment and it's very important to make sure our knowledge is up to dat such that we're not providing care which is outdated and it's also important to train Juniors
and future doctors such as they provide excellent patient care risk management is all about minimizing risk both for patients and for professionals and organizations can employ practices such as incident reporting and near misreporting and then performing things such as root cause analyses to try and figure out why certain incidents may have happened and how to minimize the risk of un incidents happening in the future for patients and for ourselves and finally openness and transparency is a cultural attribute which all NHS organizations should have things like reporting mortality rates or the rate of never events are
very important as it highlights poor performance and it holds a trust or consultant or a department accountable for poor practice to make sure that this rectified as soon as possible if you take the other option which is coverups this is extremely unhealthy as it would allow poor practice to thrive and therefore undermine excellent patient care so hopefully you can see how each of these processes impact on patient care to promote and improve patient care and how all of these together can improve and maintain high standards of care and through certain domains ensure that clinical care
is automatically excellent so hopefully this video was helpful for you and all of this information can be found as usual on our website www.f1.com where the rest of our videos can be seen also I hope you enjoy this video and until next time thank you very much for watching [Music]
