By Pamela McGowan Health reporter

Published at 11:47, Thursday, 25 September 2008

NORTH Cumbria’s hospitals could get cash bonuses for improving patient care and cutting the length of time patients spend on wards.

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The Cumberland Infirmary and West Cumberland Hospital are two of 40 from across the north west taking part in new healthcare initiative.

Going live in Carlisle and Whitehaven next week, bosses say the Advancing Quality scheme will save lives and promote better patient care.

The voluntary scheme will focus on five common medical conditions or procedures – namely heart attacks, pneumonia, heart failure, hip and knee replacements and heart bypass operations.

From October 1, the hospitals will be asked to show that they have met a series of quality standards when treating these groups of patients, for example administering the right antibiotics.

Top-performing hospitals, which show they have met the required standards, will receive financial rewards to reinvest in services.

Health chiefs say as well as improving the quality of care, the scheme will potentially save the region’s NHS around £17 million every year by cutting unnecessary re-admissions and reducing the time patients spend in hospital.

A successful trial held earlier this year has paved the way for next week’s launch.

Mike Farrar, chief executive of NHS North West said: “This is an exciting moment.

“We’ve spent the past four months putting the systems in place across all the hospitals that provide one or more of the five clinical areas to ensure the programme can work and piloting them across the region. Now the first full year of evaluation can begin.

“The NHS in the north west is already doing a great job – but there is always room for improvement. And at the end of the first 12 months of this programme – which was first pioneered in the US – we’re confident we will have delivered significant improvements to patient care.”

Sophisticated new IT information and reporting systems have been introduced specifically for the programme and will help to minimise its impact on staff workloads.

The first five conditions and procedures have been chosen because they are relevant to large parts of the NHS in the north west and because they affect significant numbers of people in the region.

The strategic health authority is working on the initiative with Premier Inc, a company which helped pioneer a similar system in the USA. Hospitals which performed well reported lower death rates, reduced complications, fewer re-admissions and shorter lengths of stay for patients.

Based on this success, NHS North West estimates that the new scheme will save 141 lives, prevent complications in 159 cases and avoid 248 re-admissions and 20,811 hospital days in the region each year.

Mr Farrar added that this is just the start, as they eventually hope to roll the scheme out to include other areas of hospital treatment.

“Advancing Quality has huge potential to improve patient care – and therefore quality of life – for patients using the NHS in the north west,” he explained.

“We believe it will help hospitals raise their game – to be more efficient and to bring patient care standards up to world class. And it will provide a better system of incentives and rewards for our hardworking NHS medical teams, which will help them expand their skills and knowledge through best practice.

“It will demonstrate that it is possible to improve patient care while at the same time reducing costs.”

PMcGowan@cngroup.co.uk

Published by http://www.newsandstar.co.uk