A new toolkit is helping trusts get the most out of the Getting It Right First Time programme, offering advice from teams who have successfully embedded the GIRFT approach into business as usual.
Teams from Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust and University Hospitals Plymouth NHS Trust developed the toolkit alongside the GIRFT team. It sets out how they have used GIRFT’s data, methodology and publications to deliver quality improvement for the benefit of their patients.
The toolkit highlights some of the benefits seen in trusts which use the GIRFT approach for continuous improvement, such as avoiding unnecessary hospital stays for patients, improving turnaround times for imaging reports, avoiding inpatient-acquired diabetic ketoacidosis incidents and increased safe weekend discharges.
Key steps highlighted include creating a core, trust-level team to co-ordinate GIRFT work, ensuring engagement across the workforce which includes clinicians, managers and support staff, and activity before and after GIRFT deep-dive visits and national report publications.
The toolkit includes a series of short videos featuring different trust-level GIRFT team members describing the stages of preparation and follow up for specialty deep-dive visits, as well as how the trust responds to GIRFT national reports and regional events. Templates for upwards reporting, improvement action tracking and assessing benefit opportunities and cost improvement plans are also provided.
‘Our Getting It Right First Time programme is a great enabler as it is about clinically led service improvement, allowing us to positively improve practice through external clinical peer-review, with the ultimate aim of improving patient care and experience’
Dr Owen Williams OBE, Chief Executive, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust
‘We are delighted to publish this toolkit, which has been developed by trusts and for trusts,
The GIRFT-team model used at Calderdale and Huddersfield and Plymouth trusts is exemplary and I am confident that trusts across the NHS will benefit from adopting it’
Professor Tim Briggs CBE, GIRFT Chair and National Director of Clinical Improvement for the NHS
An introduction to the toolkit and the role of GIRFT in improving quality of patient care.
Dr Owen Williams OBE, Chief Executive, Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust
Clinical introduction and overview
Neeraj Bhasin, Consultant vascular surgeon and Trust Clinical Lead for GIRFT at Calderdale and Huddersfield NHS Foundation Trust
