Quality data on dignity to be made accessible to clinical teams

NHS clinical teams will have access to data showing their performance against a set of more than 200 indicators of high quality care in the NHS in one place. It is the next phase in the drive to help NHS professionals improve the quality of care they deliver to patients, and will also support providers and commissioners of NHS services.

The Department of Health and The NHS Information Centre have made the data available to allow NHS professionals to use it as a basis to assess local quality improvement. They form an easily accessible menu for NHS staff to carry out local analysis and comparisons between NHS organisations.

The Indicators for Quality Improvement (IQI) have been selected in conjunction with the Royal Colleges, following extensive consultation with the NHS, and are currently based on existing national indicator sets and data collections. Over the next three to five years, the coverage of these will be expanded to more comprehensively address the wide range of NHS and Social Care services NHS professionals provide.

Some of the data for the indicators in the IQI is already available to the public on the NHS Choices website. Over the coming year, the intention is to also make the majority of the remainder available on the NHS Choices website.

The NHS Information Centre website, targeted at NHS professionals, will today make the data available for more than 75% of the indicators, with the remainder to follow shortly. The indicators can be found at www.ic.nhs.uk/mqi