Background

It is well known that good quality information is a driver of performance amongst clinical teams and helps to ensure the right services and best possible care is provided to patients.

A 'Clinical Dashboard' is a toolset of visual displays developed to provide clinicians with the relevant and timely information they need to inform daily decisions that improve quality of patient care.

The toolset gives clinicians easy access to a wealth of NHS data that is being captured locally, in a visual and usable format, whenever they need it. At its core it will display locally relevant information alongside relevant national metrics, for example best practice from Royal Colleges and specialist associations, as this information becomes available.

The development of clinical dashboards was a key recommendation from both Lord Darzi's Next Stage Review (NSR) and the Health Informatics Review.

A pilot phase was set up to deliver twenty four dashboards across the ten strategic health authorities in England. The pilot sought to establish a dashboard project in each SHA encompassing development of dashboards in clinical specialities and the wider local health community, such as General Practice or other community based clinical teams. The pilot was successfully implemented in November 2009.

During this phase the core technical infrastructure necessary for implementation of dashboards was developed, and collated into a 'toolkit' to facilitate a planned national rollout.

A demonstrator is now available as part of the toolkit. The demonstrator has been designed to enable users to view a selection of dashboards from across different care settings that were developed as part of the NHS Clinical Dashboards Pilot Programme

Pilot phase sites

The sites involved in the pilot phase were:

• North East: Northumberland, Tyne & Wear NHS Trust; Mental Health
• North West: Salford Royal NHS Foundation Trust; Renal, Care of the Elderly and General Surgery; Bolton PCT & Surgeries; General Practice
• Yorkshire and the Humber: General Practice
• West Midlands: Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust; Haematology, Gastro-intestinal and Respiratory
• East Midlands: Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust; ED, Acute Medicine, Diabetes and Urology
• East of England: Norfolk & Norwich University NHS Foundation Trust; Obstetrics and Oncology
• South West: Salisbury NHS Foundation Trust; Urology, Stroke and ENT; Wiltshire PCT (St Mellor Surgery, Amesbury); General Practice
• South Central: Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust; Elective Orthopaedics, Trauma Orthopaedics and Medical Admissions Unit; Portsmouth City PCT; General Practice
• London: The Homerton University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust; Cardiology, Anaesthetics, Acute and Admissions Unit; Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust; GI Surgery and Urology
• South East Coast: Ambulance Service NHS Trust; Ambulance

Wider NHS take-up

The Pilot set out to demonstrate the benefits of Clinical Dashboards in a wide variety of care settings. It was found that, with well motivated local clinical leadership, dashboards can help staff to deliver significant improvements in the quality of patient care and also improve the efficiency of their services. 

Conversely the Pilot also established that dashboards are not effective without clinical and executive level support or if the data used to supply the dashboards is not captured electronically.  With these points in mind it is important that each organisation makes its own decision as to whether Clinical Dashboards are right for them, and at an early stage conducts a local formal review of the specific improvements they would like a clinical dashboard to support.

Detailed learning from the Pilot has been captured in the Clinical Dashboards Toolkit referred to above. We would recommend that NHS Trusts implementing, or thinking about implementing a dashboard should take a look through this material.

We hope that the learnings from the Pilot can now be used by the wider NHS as NHS Trusts consider how Clinical Dashboards can be utilised within their own organisations to support improved quality of patient care and improved service efficiency.