The aim of Advancing Quality (AQ) is to reduce unwarranted clinical variation in the care delivered to patients, helping care organisations to reduce avoidable hospitalisation, ill health, and premature death.
We use a reliable clinical data set to demonstrate what good practice looks like and gain consensus on care standards, providing a meaningful evidence base from which organisations can target areas for improvement.
Forums allow peers to come together supportively in the pursuit of best practice, sharing learnings and benchmarking performance. We embed learning solutions in to participating organisations and encourage the sharing of best practice to create a culture of continuous improvement.
Additionally, we can help to evaluate the impact of quality improvements enabling care organisations to evidence that they are delivering high quality care.
The AQ programme collects data and supports improvement work in 6 Clinical Focus Areas, highlighting good practice and identifying unwarranted variation to enhance patient care, outcomes and experience. Each focus area has a set of metrics, developed by our Clinical Expert Groups and supported by our specialist Clinical Leads, defining what good care looks like.
AQ data is validated to ensure diagnostic accuracy and is a unique resource for condition-specific insights targeted on improvement.
We hold collaborative events (both in-person and virtual) and produce regular reports, analysis and case studies.
Our Senior Improvement Advisors provide bespoke support in initiating, implementing and sustaining quality improvement work.
Gain Consensus on Care Standards
Identify Unwarranted Variation
Improve Quality of Care
Learn and Share Best Practice
We support Trusts to improve the reliability of their clinical practices and reduce variation across six clinical focus areas. Our current Clinical Focus Areas are acute kidney injury (AKI), community acquired pneumonia (CAP), decompensated liver disease (DLD), elective hip and knee replacement, hospital acquired pneumonia (HAP) and sepsis. Since the foundation of the programme in 2008, we have covered 16 conditions in total, including acute myocardial infarction (AMI), chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and stroke. We have decided to retire focus areas when audit and improvement work has been picked up by national programmes, to avoid duplication. Details of our current 6 focus areas are below.
