How the Trust is regulated
Our corporate and clinical governance arrangements are monitored by regulatory bodies including:
- Audit Bodies
- Care Quality Commission
- Clinical Negligence Scheme for Trusts (CNST)
- Risk Pooling Scheme for Trusts (RPST)
Finance and performance targets
We have a statutory obligation to meet our financial targets, and take full account of this in setting internal budgets, priorities and expenditure. Progress on meeting financial and activity targets is reported regularly at Board of Directors meetings. The integrated board report includes progress against statutory financial targets and NHS Plan performance targets such as inpatient waiting lists, outpatient waiting times and A&E turnaround times. Further details of these national targets can be found at www.cqc.org.uk.
Clinical governance targets
Clinical governance is a process designed to improve the quality of healthcare. The Medical Director and Director of Nursing hold joint responsibility for clinical governance in the Trust, supported by the Head of Clinical Governance and a team of directorate based clinical governance facilitators.
The Clinical Governance Executive and Clinical Governance Committee oversee the clinical governance activities across the organisation, and each clinical directorate has a clinical governance lead clinician.
Each year we publish a Clinical Governance Annual Report and Clinical Governance Annual Development Plan, available from the Publication Scheme Coordinator.
Ensuring patient and staff safety
Ensuring the safety of our patients and staff is of paramount importance at Homerton, supported by a range of risk management and health and safety policies. All staff are trained to be proactive in managing risk. They are encouraged to report any risk or incident, and are supported in doing so by clear risk management policies and guidelines.
Our risk management and clinical governance teams monitor and act upon incident reports on a weekly basis. All adverse incidents are thoroughly investigated with action plans being developed to prevent recurrence.
The Risk Committee, a sub-committee of the Board, oversees compliance with national controls and assurance standards. It reports regularly to the Board of Directors.