Clinical Governance

Nestor Healthcare Group Governance Structure

Clinical governance is the process of ensuring that clinical services are safe and meet externally accepted standards - for example by ensuring that clinicians are suitably qualified, supervised and perform to an appropriate standard. Clinical governance was introduced into NHS practice in the late 1990s, and Nestor seeks to adopt similar standards. It is important not least because our customers expect us to have appropriate systems, and demonstrate that we are using them. We aim to:

• ensure that adverse incidents are identified and reported
• build a ′safety culture′, where open reporting and balanced analysis are encouraged
• avoid blame which encourages people to cover up errors for fear of retribution

An important element of the governance activities is to ensure that adverse incidents are identified and properly managed. We have defined a group standard, and have defined three key performance indicators which each company reports monthly to the Group Medical Director and hence to the Main Board. We seek to deal with individual episodes of dissatisfaction, learn from adverse incidents, and prevent recurrence. Across the Group, all complaints are logged and categorised. All serious complaints are reviewed promptly by the Group Medical Director, and subsequently by the Clinical Risk Management Group.

An organisation such as Nestor Healthcare Group providing millions of patient contacts, many hundreds of thousands of hours of care, and extended clinical services, must expect its share of issues, problems and complaints. We are promoting a blame free culture where issues are reported and addressed in an open and constructive way. This is part of our firm commitment to quality services, quality assured.

Structure

The Clinical Governance structure outlines the process where risk assessment and clinical review link into the Nestor company structure at various levels. These include a Clinical Advisory Board that meets regularly with the Group Medical Director and a Clinical Risk Management Group which is also overseen by the Group Medical Director and reviews adverse incidents and elements of risk and recommends new ways of working based on the learnings of these. Any new processes are fed back through Nestor's Business Units through Business Managers and Clinical staff.

Back to top