Quality & patient safety

Patient experience is a vital part of care quality, alongside clinical effectiveness and safety, and improving it requires listening, learning and acting on what matters most to the people who use our services.

We work closely with our patients, communities and staff to understand their experiences and use these insights to shape improvements.

Our aim is to ensure you are always treated with dignity, respect and kindness, and that you feel supported, informed and involved in decisions about your care.

Keeping you safe

Your safety is our highest priority. We have robust systems to ensure that:

• We follow national safety standards and evidence based practice
• We monitor risks across all areas of care
• Staff know how to escalate concerns and respond quickly
• We learn from incidents and share improvements across teams

As part of this, we follow NHS England’s Patient Safety Incident Response Framework (PSIRF), which sets out how NHS organisations learn from patient safety incidents and improve care by using compassionate engagement and system based approaches to learning. We publish our own Patient Safety Incident Response Plan, which explains the safety priorities we focus on and how we respond to incidents across the Trust.

If at any point you or your family are worried or feel something isn’t right, please speak to the team caring for you, we want to hear from you.

How we improve care

We are committed to delivering safe, effective and compassionate care for every patient, every time. Quality is at the heart of everything we do, and we continually review, improve and innovate to make sure our services meet the highest standards.

We work closely with patients, families, carers and our staff to understand what matters most to the people who use our services. Their feedback helps us shape improvements, strengthen our safety processes and enhance patient experience across all areas of care.

To ensure our services remain high quality, we:

• Prioritise patient safety by following evidence‑based clinical guidelines, learning from incidents and sharing best practice across teams.
• Monitor our performance through audits, patient feedback, national benchmarking, and regulatory reviews.
• Invest in our people, supporting staff with ongoing training, development and the right tools to provide excellent care.
• Embrace innovation and digital improvements to enhance access, reduce delays and support smoother patient journeys.
• Promote a culture of continuous improvement, where every member of staff is encouraged to identify opportunities for change and contribute to better outcomes.

We are focused on ensuring every patient receives care that is high‑quality, timely and centred around your individual needs.

Your experience matters

Every interaction you have with us is part of your overall experience, and every member of staff plays a role in making that experience positive. We know that you have the best outcomes when you feel listened to, respected and involved throughout your care journey.

We review patient feedback regularly and use it to shape our improvement work.

Being open, transparent and accountable

We are committed to sharing information about:

• The quality of care we provide
• How we perform against national standards
• What we are doing to make improvements
• How patient feedback is shaping our services

We publish regular reports, quality accounts and performance information, in line with national expectations for transparency and assurance.

This includes our Quality Account, which looks at how good our care has been over the last 12 months, and what we need to do to make it even better.

It explains what’s important to us, and why we will continue to work hard to make sure the services you receive are the best quality possible.