Health services

Tender description

To enable Barts Health to proceed to procure a suitably experienced external Clinical Quality Improvement partner, able to demonstrate a proven track record in working with large healthcare systems, a reputation for multidisciplinary QI expertise, and demonstrable impact of delivery of measurable improvements in patient safety and experience.. Barts Health NHS Trust is one of the largest NHS Trusts in England. Barts Health NHS Trust (Trust) provide a huge range of clinical services to people in east London and beyond. The Trust operates a group model, from four major hospital sites (The Royal London, St Bartholomew’s, Whipps Cross and Newham) and a number of community locations, including Mile End hospital. Around 2.5 million people living in east London look to the Trust to provide them with the healthcare they need. We have around 16 000 directly employed staff, of which somewhere in the region of 1 500 clinical/service managers from front line (including consultants and ward managers) through to senior management. We are seeking to procure a partner with proven expertise in Healthcare Quality Improvement, to help support development and implementation of a sustainable, unified programme of quality improvement across the organisation. In light of what we believe we need to accomplish in relation to pace and depth of delivering our vision for QI, it is expected that the partnership is likely to be in place for 3 years or more, starting with intensive support through the first year and tapering to become self-sufficient, reducing overall partnership costs as rapidly as possible, as we build our internal capability and capacity. Barts Health seeks to deliver a massive step change in patient safety, quality and experience — with our multi-professional staff across all sites enabled, empowered and aligned from Ward to Board with appropriate, evidence-based tools for improvement, and continuously working ‘with and for’ our patients to deliver outstanding safe and compassionate care. While there are undoubtedly areas of outstanding clinical practice with excellent clinical outcomes and patient experience; significant variation still exists across the organization in terms of expected, reliable quality and safety outcomes. We have recognised that the move to good and outstanding CQC ratings, requires us to effect a step change in leadership, clarity and coordination of our QI approaches to these improvement challenges. And we are now actively working on a trust wide, unified approach to quality improvement, which we are calling “We Improve”. We believe, the time is right for a step change in terms of a coherent Trust wide approach to QI, including, over the next 3-5 years: — making QI a leadership priority for our Board, — clarity of expectation of leaders at all levels in their QI role, — adequately resourced QI team and internal QI faculty, — a BH QI tool kit of improvement methodologies, — a shared approach to measurement for improvement, — joined up QI capability and capacity building, — identification of a high impact, trust-wide improvement initiative, running concurrently with local, rapid cycle quality improvements; and — begin to build a reputation for QI-related education and research. Our We Improve approach will be a critical enabler in our transition from ‘Requires Improvement’ and ‘Good’ to consistently ‘outstanding’. We recognise that a QI culture change at Barts Health, with staff seeking not only ‘to deliver quality care but also continuously improve the care they deliver’, will enable us to address the broader system requirements to improve quality, productivity and efficiency in the context of the demographic, infrastructural, workforce and financial challenges we face.