Partnering for improvement across NHS providers

• Research type

  Research Study

• Full title

  Partnering for improvement across NHS providers: a qualitative research study

• IRAS ID

  272427

• Contact name

  Ross Millar

• Contact email

  r.millar@bham.ac.uk

• Sponsor organisation

  University of Birmingham

• Duration of Study in the UK

  1 years, 1 months, 27 days

• Research summary

  There are continuing concerns about NHS providers such as hospitals. These are often reported in the media where examples of poor patient care may have been due to clinical errors, negligence, staff shortages, poor leadership, and a lack of infrastructure. In response to these problems different governments have looked at ways to improve these services. One of the ways they have tried to do this is by getting services to work together rather than separately to solve any concerns. Different ways of working together have been put forward that can range from NHS providers and staff voluntarily coming together to solve problems through to government regulators enforcing NHS providers experiencing problems to learn from others doing well, or in some cases be taken over by another NHS provider to try and improve the situation. The merger of NHS hospital trusts is an example of this approach where two previously separate hospitals join up services and have one executive board overseeing the merged organisation.
  The aim of our research is to learn about how, why and when these different approaches to working together – which we call partnering - should be used to improve NHS providers. Our review will go deeper into understanding these different approaches by looking at how and where they have been used in the NHS as well as other public and private sector services. We will speak to NHS policy makers and other influential groups about how these approaches to partnering can work and what has been their experience of putting them into practice. We will speak to NHS providers currently involved in these partnerships and ask them about whether these are working out as planned. We will also have three workshops to encourage discussion and debate about how these approaches can be used in the future.

• REC name

  N/A

• REC reference

  N/A