This morning, I spent some time reviewing the report just submitted by Professor Sir Bruce Keogh KBE, MD, DSc, FRCS, FRCP (National Medical Director, for the NHS in England) into 14 NHS Trusts that have been causing concern due to higher mortality ratios.
His report (rather than the reporting of his report) deserves to be read by all involved in managing and governing the public services. He is clearly a very wise and measured man with a burning passion to make the NHS even better.
You can access the report here.
The report begins with a series of ‘ambitions’ that arose from the work he and his colleagues carried out with patients and clinicians engaged with these 14 Trusts. Wearing my ‘police hat’, I got to wondering what if he had been inspecting a number of police services instead? Below I have imagined what these ambitions might look like for the police service…
Ambition One: We will have made demonstrable progress towards reducing avoidable deaths & injuries in custody and out on the streets of the UK, rather than debating what HMIC, Home Office, IPCC statistics and other measures can and can’t tell us about the quality of care our police services are providing.
Ambition Two: The leadership of the UK police services (Home Secretary, Chief Constables, PCCs, Boards etc) will be confidently and competently using data and other intelligence for the forensic pursuit of quality improvement. They, along with the public, will have rapid access to accurate, insightful and easy to use data about quality at service line level.
Ambition three: Victims, their families and members of the public (including offenders) will increasingly feel like they are being treated as vital and equal partners in the design and assessment of their local police service. They should also be confident that their feedback is being listened to and see how this is impacting on their own community safety and the policing of others.
Ambition four: The public, police officers and staff will have confidence in the quality assessments made by HMIC, not least because they will have been active participants in inspections.
Ambition five: No police constabulary, however big, small or remote, will be an island unto itself. Professional, academic and managerial isolation will be a thing of the past.
Ambition six: Police officer and other frontline staffing levels and skill mix will appropriately reflect the caseload and the severity of crimes and antisocial behaviour they are tackling and be transparently reported by PCCs and Police Boards.
Ambition seven: Junior officers and members of staff in training will not just be seen as the police leaders of tomorrow, but police leaders of today. The police services of the UK will join the best organisations in the world by harnessing the energy and creativity of its young officers and staff.
Ambition eight: All police organisations will understand the positive impact that happy and engaged staff and officers have on victim satisfaction and restoration, and on community safety outcomes, including crime rates, and will be making this a key part of their quality improvement strategy.
In most cases, I have just tweaked a couple of words to ‘policify’ the ambition. What do you think?
What other ambitions would you add or change to the above?
Courtesy of Jon Harvey at A Just Future: Fair for All
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