Clinical Governance: doing the right thing

I attended a workshop on clinical governance on 23 September, hosted by CLIST and held at the Bloomsbury Healthcare Library. I decided to go more out of duty than interest as clinical governance is one of those things I find it very hard to get excited about. I was pleasantly surprised by what I heard however and found the session much more interesting than expected. Our speaker, Nada Schiavone, who is currently the Patient Safety Lead at NHS London, was a very engaging speaker with much experience in both clinical and managerial work. Her presentation was peppered with real examples of situations she has faced and she was very candid about her concerns regarding the changes currently planned for the NHS and how they will affect patient safety and clinical governance.

The course consisted of a presentation about clinical governance itself (very simply put, clinical governance is about doing the right thing, at the right time, in the right way, in the right place for the right patient) and how it fits in with the aims and objectives of the NHS. This was followed by her thoughts on how NHS library services could have a positive impact on clinical governance. Finally we split into groups and worked through some scenarios. As part of the presentation Nada asked us to guess the average cost of litigation claims against the NHS costs the average acute Trust and it turned out to be £21 million a year – that is £21 million per Trust, per year! So, very important to get things right, obviously.
As far as library involvement in clinical governance, Nada proposed the following questions:

- Are you on the right committees for supporting evidence-based practice?
- Are you visible?
- What evidence base can the library produce to support integrated governance (a fancier word for clinical governance, which includes governance other than just clinical)
- What information does the service provide for patients?
- How do you demonstrate support for audit/research projects?
- Can you help with presenting data? Writing a report? Publishing a piece of work?

She also stressed the importance of being aware of service redesigns and aligning library resources to Trust strategies and staff needs, all of which sounded very familiar! I went away with a lot to think about and will possibly now be able to summon a little more excitement about clinical governance…

Feast or Famine...

Having just complained last week that it was a bit quiet it has suddenly gone busy again here in the Healthcare Library. Staff inductions have started up again and we also had a new intake of student doctors which can only mean library tours and presentations for all. We are also running a journal survey across all three sites and have had over 100 responses so far – much better than expected. I spent much time the week before last played about with our LMS so we could send out an email to all our users (who have email addresses). This will serve a dual purpose: catching people who are library members but not Athens users and seeing just how comprehensive (or not) our records are on the LMS. It will also test the capabilities of the LMS itself which is quite good at ingesting data but not so admirable at spitting it out again. Spent a while with the Senior Library Assistant experimenting and we eventually got it to run a report as a text document which I opened in Access, refined some of the data, saved as a text document again then opened in Word to insert the required semicolons needed for Outlook.

Of course when I sent my marvellous instructions to the Library Manager at our other site he sent back an email with a much easier way but the nice thing about my way is that we get all the bounced back emails, which the poor Library Assistant (and myself!) spent a few hours amending last week. It gave us a chance to clear out some old records as well so I think the experiment worked quite well...

I have attended a few meetings and training sessions the last few weeks including a CLIST meeting, a clinical governance training session (which I will talk about in a separate blog post) and the R&D Committee meeting. CLIST, held at the Bloomsbury Healthcare Library, is always a good chance to catch up with what has been going on with the other information skills trainers in London and my counterpart at another site library met afterwards to plan our critical appraisal session in October. We sent the communication out last week and already have about 8 takers! I have also recently joined the Trust R&D Committee and attended my first meeting last Friday where new proposals for research in the Trust were heard and matters around research were discussed. I found it very interesting, informative and highly professional, even though I didn’t understand everything discussed it gave me a sense of how the library could get involved in research at the Trust.

And finally, we have been in the news again – even hitting the BBC headlines last week! I have a feeling it's going to be a tough winter...

- Patients ‘at grave risk’ from poorly trained doctors (Independent on Sunday, 19 Sep 2010)

- Sidcup hospital to close A&E and maternity over the winter (BBC News, 22 Sep 2010)