Clinical Governance is the way that the NHS works to improve and maintain the quality of care that patients receive.  It is about ensuring that patients get the right care at the right time from the right person.

At East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT), responsibility for clinical governance lies with every member of staff, including doctors, nurses, physiotherapists, managers, radiographers, laboratory staff, cleaners, porters and administrative staff.  We are clinically lead and managerially supported.  Everyone works together to ensure that patients receive the best possible care.

The Trust Governance Unit works together with other members of staff to ensure the Trust meets its statutory duty to maintain high-quality services.  Our team manage chaplaincy services and coordinate emergency preparedness, policy administration, patient information, information governance, incident management, clinical audit and clinical effectiveness.  We coordinate advancing quality, patient safety initiatives, health and safety, complaints and litigation and take the organisational lead role for administration of external registration and accreditation by organisations such as Care Quality Commission (CQC) and NHS Litigation Authority (NHSLA).  These functions are provided across the Trust-wide footprint.

"Quality is our organising principle and compliance with standards, targets and regulatory requirements are a given."

The Governance Unit can be contacted on 01254 733704

Declaration of Compliance

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust is pleased to confirm that we are compliant with the Government's requirement to eliminate mixed-sex accommodation, except when it is in the patient's overall best interest, or reflects their personal choice.

We have the necessary facilities, resources and culture to ensure that patients who are admitted to our hospitals will only share the room where they sleep with members of the same sex, and same-sex toilets and bathrooms will be close to their bed area.

Sharing with members of the opposite sex will only happen when clinically necessary (for example where patients need specialist equipment such as in the Intensive Care Unit), or when patients actively choose to share.

If our care should fall short of the required standard, we will report it.  We will also set up an audit mechanism to make sure that we do not misclassify any of our reports.  We will publish the results of that audit as part of the Annual Quality Account.

Driving Improvements

We are one of a number of NHS organisations who want to be open and honest with our patients. This is how a modern NHS hospital should be – open and accountable to the public and patients and always driving improvements in care. As a member of the ‘Open and honest care: driving improvement’ programme, we continue to work with patients and staff to provide open and honest care, and through implementing quality improvements, further reduce the harm that patients sometimes experience when they are in our care.

We have made a commitment to publish a set of patient outcomes; patient experience and staff experience measures so that patients and the public can see how we are performing in these areas. Each month we share what we have learned and use this information to identify where changes can be made to improve care.

You can click on the monthly reports on the right to view information relating to key areas of patient safety and care.

Related documents

2017

2016

2015

The reporting and learning from all incidents and near misses is the cornerstone of the Trust's Risk Management Plan and Safety Strategy.  Incident reporting is a key aspect of the process of identification of risk and alerts the Local Managers and the Trust to conditions of patient safety or poor quality care for which suitably early management and remedial action can prevent recurrence.

East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT) reports patient safety incidents to the National Reporting and Learning System (NRLS).  Information is passed to the NRLS to enable it to learn from patient safety incidents and perform its functions relating to the ongoing management of health care services in England and Wales.

The NRLS operates on an anonymous basis; however, information which constitutes patients', staff or visitors', personal data may in some cases be passed to the NRLS.  Where this is recognised, it will be deleted, as it is not the intention of the NRLS to hold person identifiable information.

If you would like to know more about patient safety locally, then please contact the Clinical Care and Governance Unit, Royal Blackburn Teaching Hospital, who will be happy to discuss this with you.

Download our Patient Safety Incident Response Plan 2023.

(Please note that this PDF is not in an accessible format)