Clinical Governance Statement
Governance Process
Governance in healthcare is referred to as clinical governance, “a system through which NHS organisations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish”.
A fundamental principle of the Healthier Together (HT) programme is to deliver information and advice that is reliable, consistent, and trustworthy.
Due to the serious impact that this advice on user’s healthcare decisions, it is of paramount importance that we ensure rigorous governance processes to uphold the reliability of the content:
- All clinical pathways and safety netting sheets on the website are developed collaboratively by clinicians from across South West London. These clinical resources are drafted by Healthier Together site leads and subject matter experts, and then reviewed by each acute Hospital Trust's clinical governance process. Once finalised, approvals are sought from members representing each provider organisation and the resources are reviewed and ratified by the Healthier Together executive committee.
- Parent facing resources are developed by topic expert(s) from across South West London and reviewed by a member(s) of the executive group.
- Following ratification, the pages are proofread by the project manager before going live on the website.
- Clinical pathways and safety netting resources are reviewed every 3 years by the programme lead and clinical review group and if amendments are required, by the appropriate regional network(s).
- Parent facing resources are routinely reviewed every 3 years. The project manager is automatically notified through an email alert that a page is due a review. In addition, the website offers a feedback function so that users can suggest amendments at any point. This is checked regularly by the project manager and clinical lead.
The above steps make sure that patient safety is ensured by reducing the risk of having outdated or unreliable advice on the website.
The Executive Team contains a clinical lead and project manager. Both members are well connected within their respective area, and they will notify the team when there needs to be changes to the website content.
Feedback from users and the community
It is extremely important that Healthier Together offers content that is accessible and reflects the need of the local population.
After a page has been formally signed off, it is important for the executive team to know that the content is also accessible and correct from an everyday user perspective: the general public. To make sure the new content meet user standards, we add a survey to every new page which asks whether the page has been useful and if the user has any feedback. The survey remains on the page until the page has reached a certain amount of views, and then it is being taken off. During this period we will respond to any feedback and make changes where necessary. We also intermittently conduct focus group sessions to gather additional feedback in order to improve the website.
To have an even closer engagement with website users, we invite specific demographic users to join our executive meeting where we present them with content which is relevant to them e.g. maternity pages for a pregnant woman and growing up pages for a young person.