During the last few years, City Hospitals Sunderland NHS Foundation Trust has delivered a number of significant performance improvements.  The Trust has maintained existing high levels of performance in a number of key areas such as referral to treatment times and further improved performance in a number of other areas such as reducing the number of cases of MRSA and C.difficile as well as significantly improving the percentage of stroke patients that spend at least 90% of their time on a dedicated stroke unit.

To support performance improvement and to ensure that we achieve our goals, we have a well established and robust monitoring and reporting system in place.  Working closely with all the Trust clinical directorates and departments services we internally review our performance on quality, business and financial issues throughout the year.

So, how do we know we do well?

All NHS bodies are subject to a number of external reviews to assess our performance and the outcomes are made available to the public and other healthcare organisations. These include the following:

Regulatory Ratings Reviews

Monitor, our independent regulator assesses Foundation Trusts on the basis of risk ratings, which includes Governance Risk Rating, essentially a measure of the Trust’s performance against a range of performance targets.  Green equates to achievement of all relevant targets; amber relates to non achievement of a target with a weighted score of ‘1’ or more and red relates to non achievement of more than one target with a score of ‘4’ or more.

The Trust submitted a plan at the start of the 2010/11 year that identified a risk around the achievement of the Cancer urgent referral to treatment waiting times (62 day pathway).  As a result the governance risk was highlighted as an ‘amber-green’ risk.   As expected, in quarter 1 the resulting performance against this indicator was below target and lead to an ‘amber-green’ risk rating.  However since then, the position has subsequently improved to a ‘green’ risk rating over quarter 2, as the 85% national target for the cancer 62 day indicator was achieved.

Care Quality Commission

City Hospitals Sunderland is regulated by the Care Quality Commission (CQC).  

The Care Quality Commission widget below shows a summary of whether this service is meeting the essential standards of safety and quality.  

If a service is meeting all standards it will show a tick; if a service is not meeting one standard or more, it will show a cross and an explanation that the CQC require improvements or are taking enforcement action. This also links to our full profile page on the CQC website.

Patient surveys

The CQC coordinates surveys to collect feedback on the experiences of people using a range of health care services provided by the NHS.  The results are used in a range of ways, including the assessment of NHS performance as well as in regulatory activities such as registration, monitoring ongoing compliance and reviews.  The results of the latest surveys can be seen via the link to the Care Quality Commission - CHS.  More recent surveys include:

• Outpatient department survey (published February 2010)
• Adult Inpatient Survey  (published May 2010)
  

CQUIN

A proportion of the Trusts income was conditional based upon achieving quality improvement and innovation goals through the Commissioning for Quality and Innovation (CQUIN) payment framework which was agreed between City Hospitals Sunderland and any person or body the Trust entered into a contract, agreement or arrangement with for the provision of NHS services.

For 2010/11, approximately £3m of income is attached to the delivery of quality improvements through the CQUIN framework. At this stage the Trust is on track and confident that the vast majority of these goals will be achieved.