Clinical Governance

The concept of clinical governance was introduced to the health service in Scotland by the circular Clinical Governance NHS MEL (1998) 75. The circular stated that clinical governance now made quality of care an integral part of the NHS governance framework. So in NHS Tayside from 1 April 1999 the corporate governance of our organisation has included both financial and quality issues.

Clinical governance is a system to facilitate the co-ordination of multiple activities and key elements to inform and progress the improvement in
NHS Tayside’s services, ensuring they are person-
centred, safe and effective and based on best available

evidence and practice. Clinical governance makes quality of care an integral part of the NHS governance framework. Key elements in our system are:

  • Clinical Risk Management
  • Clinical Effectiveness
  • Person-Centredness
  • Continuous Improvement
  • Staff Focus

    Good clinical governance relies on all of these elements being brought together through robust reporting and escalation processes and using a risk management approach to ensure person-centred, safe and effective clinical care. Many members of our staff will already be familiar with these improvement activities, risk identification and management elements but we need to ensure we make the concerted effort to bind these activities together and make them more effective.

    This strategy provides a shared vision and describes a robust framework for clinical governance, including the organisational structure and lines of accountability which will ultimately provide assurance about the quality of care from the individual patient to our Board.

    The focus of our strategy is to:

  • Promote and encourage appropriate patient and carer involvement in everything we do
  • Deliver high-quality, evidence-based care and prevention
  • Encourage and enable our staff to work in multi-disciplinary and multi-professional (ie

    joined-up) teams and use reflective practice

  • Anticipate and prevent harm through robust systems for clinical risk, patient safety and

    investigation of near misses

  • Understand and minimise unnecessary variation by the intelligent use of data,

    measurement and improvement science

  • Demonstrate learning and sustainable change from adverse events

Quality Improvement projects should be approved by Clinical Governance.

Read the NHS Tayside Clinical Governance Strategy 2013-2016 in full for more information. A particularly good read pre-interviews!