The NHS Benchmarking Network are thrilled to announce a GP Benchmarking initiative!

The Independent Doctors Federation have commissioned the NHS Benchmarking Network to launch the GP Benchmarking campaign as a part of the Networks bespoke services.  This campaign tackles the updated Care Quality Commission Good Governance regulations and gives valuable insight and identifies areas for improvement.

The GP Benchmarking campaign is a unique opportunity for members of the Independent Doctors Federation to measure and improve their care and treatment outcomes.

The campaign aims to support IDF members in meeting the CQC's Regulation 17: Good governance, which was updated in August 2023. The regulation requires GP practices to monitor and evaluate the quality and effectiveness of their services. This initiative will help GP’s to do this by providing a Practice and a Patient Survey, alongside a benchmarking report that will compare results with other similar practices.

The Practice Survey covers three clinical areas: hypertension, hypothyroidism and statins. GP practices are required to provide information on the prevalence, prescribing and monitoring of these conditions in their practice. IDF members can download the full specification of the questions here and complete the survey offline. All responses will be kept confidential.

Please watch this Webinar video for more information.

The Patient Survey is designed to capture patient views and satisfaction with their GP’s own practice. It is available as a QR Code that can easily be shared with patients.

The deadline for completing both surveys is 30th April 2024.

By taking part in this campaign, GP practices will not only demonstrate compliance with the CQC regulation, but also gain valuable insights into their practice's performance and areas for improvement.

If you are not a member of IDF and you want to join this campaign, please contact their membership team to find out how to become a member. As a member, you will benefit from access to exclusive resources, events, training and networking opportunities. You will also be part of a community of professionals who share your passion for improving the private healthcare system.

If you have any questions or need any support, please email the IDF at info@idf.co.uk  

If you would like to discuss membership or bespoke services the NHS Benchmarking Network offer please contact enquiries@nhsbenchmarking.nhs.uk

Unveiling our 2024/25 member work programme

We are thrilled to introduce our member work programme for 2024/25.

The new member work programme has innovation, collaboration, shared learning and high-quality data at its heart. Whether you are an existing member or considering joining our community, we feel there is something in this work programme that will benefit you and your organisation.

Members can look forward to engaging projects, interactive events and insightful data aimed at addressing key challenges and delivering opportunities across all sectors.

Registration for the 2024/25 member projects begins from March, with data collection beginning from April. Please make sure you renew your membership so you don’t miss out.

Membership renewals
We’d like to thank each of our members for being a part of our benchmarking community in 2023/24. Our team will be reaching out to all designated Product (membership) Leads over the coming weeks. Please look out for communications from Kim Burton, Network Development Manager, including a NHSBN membership renewal letter and information on next steps.

Not yet a member?
If you are from a non-member organisation, we invite you to have a conversation about how the 2024/25 member work programme can support you. Please get in touch with the Support Team to arrange this.

Improvements to our validation process

The NHS Benchmarking Network takes pride in the quality of the data we collect from, and share with, our members. A significant part of ensuring the quality of this data is the validation process undertaken following every data collection period.

Whilst essential, this process can be complex and time consuming; both for the Network team and for participating members, and this has historically been managed via email. But 2023 saw the introduction and testing of a new approach.

For the first time, participating organisations were able to view and respond to validation queries directly via our Members’ Area through a new dedicated validations page, resulting in a smoother process for all involved, improved response rates to validation queries, and an overall improvement to the quality of data in our toolkits.

These updates were driven by user feedback, both within the team and from participating members, and are the result of a collaborative effort between the sector teams and our Development Hub.

The team continue to look for ways of improving our Members’ Area and making the process of data collection simpler for our members, and there will be more updates to come in 2024.

Accessing code sharing under the new Terms of Membership

In our ongoing efforts to provide valuable resources and tools to our members, we updated our Terms of Membership (communicated throughout August and September). The update allows opted-in submitting member organisations to access the unique identifier codes of their peers who have chosen to share data, fostering greater collaboration and insight in our benchmarking projects. 

“Show codes” feature
We are excited to introduce the “show codes” feature, which is available on the 2023 toolkit for membership projects on the members’ area. This feature provides opted-in submitting member organisation access to the unique identifier codes of other opted-in submitting members, helping you to connect, collaborate, and leverage the collective knowledge and expertise within the NHSBN community.

Who can access “show codes”?
The “show codes” button is exclusively available to users with the following permissions from an opted-in submitting member organisation:

• Product (membership) Lead

• Deputy Product Lead

• Project Lead

• Deputy Project Lead

If you hold any of these roles for an opted-in submitting member organisation, you can access the unique identifier codes of other opted-in submitting members associated with the projects your organisation participates in.

How to access
Accessing the outputs and submission codes is simple and user friendly. Follow these steps:

1. Log in to the NHSBN members’ area using your login credentials.

2. Navigate to the project output page of a project that your organisation has participated in.

3. Open the full project toolkit and select the 2023 year.

4. Look for the “show codes” button at the top of the toolkit.

5. Click on the button to reveal the list of opted-in submitting members who are connected to that specific project. Their unique identifier codes will be displayed for your reference.

This is NHSBN’s first step with code sharing between our member organisations. We understand from some members that they wish for further sharing we will explore this further. In the meantime, we hope that the feature supports members with collaboration and shared learning.

If you have any queries, please contact the Support Team.

The British Society for Heart Failure Strategic Partnership of the 25in25 Initiative

NHSBN is pleased announce its partnership with The British Society for Heart Failure (BSH)  along with PRIMIS and Strategic Intelligence Alliance in Healthcare.

The collaborative of expert partners is for the ‘discover and develop’ pilot phase of the 25in25 quality improvement implementation programme beginning early 2024. The national rollout will follow in 2025. The objective is to achieve the BSH led 25in25 ambition to reduce deaths due to heart failure by 25% in the next 25 years. This translates to over 10,000 lives saved annually.

Background
The BSH, the professional association for heart failure care in the UK, aims to increase knowledge and promote research about the diagnosis, causes, management, and consequences of heart failure amongst healthcare professionals. Their intention is to delay or prevent the onset of heart failure and improve care for patients with heart failure. To learn more, please visit: https://www.bsh.org.uk

Overview
With heart failure rates set to double by 2040, we must come together as communities to detect and treat heart failure much earlier. Hence, the aim of the pilot programme is to create a ‘dashboard’ from ‘discover and develop’ insights and data gathered from General Practice records across 4 domains;

• risk analysis,

• diagnosis,

• guideline directed medical therapy and

• quality of life measures such as mental health and wellbeing.

Partners
Announced as partners by the BSH at the inaugural meeting of selected pilot sites, NHS Benchmarking Network PRIMIS and the Strategic Intelligence Alliance in Healthcare will initially collaborate to develop the coding and tools necessary to collect the data. We will work alongside selected health systems to validate the search criteria and drive quality improvements that result in better and more equitable heart failure care. Additionally, the 25in25 programme will support improved outcomes in patients with long term conditions leading to heart failure, and to address health inequalities by tackling disparities of access, experience, and outcomes in under-served patient groups. An area that is so important to us here at the Network .

NHS Benchmarking Network (NHSBN) provides dashboards and reports for its members and delivers multiple national clinical audits, such as CVDPREVENT, and bespoke projects to support NHS planning and service improvement. NHSBN uses data tools and insight to share excellent practice through findings events throughout the year. NHSBN will be responsible for the national rollout of the dashboard to be developed from analysis of data gathered from the pilot communities.

Sarah Atkinson, Managing Director of NHSBN, commented: “NHSBN has the necessary infrastructure, expertise, and experience to deliver the national rollout of this important initiative. The data gathered at community level through this programme may also help us, in conjunction with PRIMIS, to inform and develop future indicators for audit use.”

PRIMIS, a specialist team of health informaticians within the School of Medicine at the University of Nottingham, provide expert advice on the intelligent use of primary care data to the NHS, academics, and industry partners and their tools and training programmes support behavioural change in general practice, often involving the widespread scale and adoption of healthcare innovations.

The Strategic Intelligence Alliance in Healthcare (SIA4H), an experienced business intelligence team able to build complex models to help analyse available healthcare data, using a wide range of different datasets to gain insights and understanding.

New faces in the NHS Benchmarking Network Steering Group!

We are pleased to welcome three newly elected representative’s to the NHS Benchmarking Network’s Steering Group! 

Welcome!
Melanie Duffy, Director of Community and Primary Care from Lancashire and South Cumbria NHS FT.
Mel has a fantastic background in information, operations, transformation and strategy, consistently using data to identify improvement opportunities for optimal service effectiveness and value.

Jess Lievesley, Executive Director of Strategy, Transformation and Organisational Effectiveness from Barnet, Enfield and Haringey NHS Trust and Camden and Islington NHS FT.
Jess has extensive board level experience within Mental Health Services in strategic and operational roles, with responsibilities for transformation, quality improvement, performance improvement and population health improvement.

Philip Murray, Director of Finance and Performance/Deputy CEO South West London & St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust. 
Philip is a qualified accountant responsible for performance and has experience working within commissioning, acute, mental health and teaching hospitals

Melanie Duffy will be representing the Community Sector and Philip and Jess will be representing the Mental Health Sector.

Steering Group representatives are elected through a formal election process and member votes. 

What is the Steering Group?
The Steering Group, oversee and govern the Network activities and is made up of 4 representatives from each Sector drawn from its membership and one representative from our host organisation East London NHS Foundation Trust. 

The Steering Group, use their experience, skills and knowledge of their specific sector to assist in making strategic decisions, governance of the Network, representing the interests of member organisation and agreeing and overseeing the Core Work Programme.

To find out who else represents the Network’s Steering group please see our website https://www.nhsbenchmarking.nhs.uk/steering-group

Thank you!
We would like to express thanks to the Steering Group members who have recently resigned, for their support, contribution and participation in the Network as Steering Group members over their tenure.

Mark Gerrard, Chief Data Officer for Tameside and Glossop Integrated NHS Foundation Trust.  

Elizabeth Calder, Executive Director of Performance & Strategic Development, for Greater Manchester Mental Health NHS Foundation Trust

Jason Hollidge, Chief Finance Officer, for Norfolk and Suffolk NHS Foundation Trust. 

Terms of Membership Update & FAQs

We are continuing to see a positive response to the Terms of Membership updates, with 92%* of respondents opting-in to share data.

*As of 7th September 2023.

 We thought it would be helpful to share some of the FAQs on the topic.

We have extended the response form deadline date to Friday 15th September 2023, and we have contacted the CEOs at the member organisations we are awaiting a response from.  

 If you’d like to check if your organisation has responded, please contact enquiries@nhsbenchmarking.nhs.uk.

The way we share data is changing

We are led by our members, and we listen to your requests and respond to your needs. Following feedback, we are pleased to announce that we will be updating our Terms of Membership, effective from September 2023.

We will be making member identifier codes available within the Network. This change is being introduced at the request of members and has been ratified by Member Reference Groups and the Network Steering Group. The key detail for this change can be found in Clause 14 on our updated Terms of Membership.

The Terms of Membership are a key document that explains how your organisation's membership with the NHS Benchmarking Network is managed. It also explains the legal relationship between the parties involved in delivering the Network across health and social care.

For a summary of the updates we have made, please click here.

Update from 29th August 2023:
Member organisation CEOs and Product (membership) Leads have been contacted with next steps and to confirm if their organisation is opting-in to data sharing. As of 29th August, 93% of respondents have opted-in to the sharing of data.

If you have any questions, please get in touch with the Network Support Team.