Health services

Tender description

The overarching aim of this audit programme is: To improve the quality of services and the outcomes achieved for mothers and newborns cared for by hospital maternity services in England, Wales and Scotland. This aim will be achieved through a project with the following objectives: 1. To engage patients, those that deliver care and those that commission and regulate care in defining the audit measures most likely to support both quality assurance and quality improvement of maternity services. 2. To enable improvements through the provision of timely, high-quality data that compares providers of healthcare to at least the level of named maternity service. 3. To consider how data captured in the MCDS, other data collected in MIS and other sources of data in NHS Wales and Scotland, could be used to support these audit measures. This is both for the purposes of minimising local burden of data entry and so that the audit itself supports the establishment of data flow in the MCDS and NHS Wales and Scottish systems. 4. NHS England has recently announced a Maternity review: http://www.england.nhs.uk/2015/03/03/maternitycare/ It is anticipated that over time this may provide a valuable source of intelligence when shaping the scope of this audit, and in particular when selecting topics for topic-specific, time-limited audits. 5. To achieve and maintain close alignment with relevant Nice and Sign national guidelines and quality standards throughout the audit, as appropriate. 6. To include risk adjustment as appropriate, in order to support meaningful comparisons. 7. To develop the reporting schedules and feedback mechanisms for the audit to support the local use of data, minimising the reporting delay and providing continual access to each unit for their own data. The use of dashboard style outputs and other reporting styles should be explored. Consider the needs of the full range of audiences who may contribute to improving patient outcomes. 8. To develop an appropriate topic selection process for the time-limited audits to consider both need and potential benefit of auditing in that area. Aims of this National Clinical Audit: The successful tenderer will provide a national comparative clinical audit of the quality and outcomes of NHS funded maternity and perinatal care delivered to women and infants by maternity services in England, Wales and Scotland. The audit will comprise: — Element 1: A continuous prospective clinical audit comprising a number of key processes and outcomes as indicators of high-quality delivery of care by maternity services. — Element 2: Periodic, time-limited, topic-specific prospective audits achieved by temporary expansion of the audit dataset. Suitable providers will need to be able to demonstrate: — Effective and fully-integrated clinical leadership; — The ability to engage actively with all relevant professional disciplines; — Robust project management skills; — Methodological expertise and experience, data collection, data cleaning and analysis and information security/management skills, including understanding / experience of patient-level data linkage; — Sound knowledge of information governance and procedures for gaining permissions for data processing; — Capacity and experience to successfully deliver the above requirement(s); — Sound economic and financial standing assessed by evidence of professional indemnity insurance, audited accounts covering at least 3 previous financial years, a statement of turnover, profit and loss account and cash flow for the most recent year of trading, a statement of your cash flow forecast for the current year and a bank letter outlining the current cash and credit position.