“I now understand how to present data to Clinical Service Units in a way that staff will understand. I’ve learnt how to identify when changes are needed by looking at data and identify what is just normal variation.”
Katie Middleton Tansley is a Clinical Effectiveness and Compliance Manager at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. Part of the work that Katie and her team are involved in is making sure staff follow national best practice guidance (for example NICE guidelines).
Katie’s current projects involve the following:
- Ensuring the trust is compliant with national audits
- External agency visits
- The Trust doesn’t have clinical audit team as this is delegated to clinical service units (CSUs), so Katie’s team manage the database of audits for trust mandatory audit programme
- Producing quality accounts
- Producing quarterly mortality reports
- Creating dashboards for data to be presented
- Producing data for Trust’s annual quality reports
- Presenting data to CSUs and specialities to show how compliant they are according to national guidelines.
Katie attended the Understanding and Reducing Variation course with 5 members of her team to see how they can better present their data and highlight where there are issues in certain areas. Since attending the session, Katie and her team have now had more conversations around how they can present dashboards to CSUs in a way that staff will understand. A number of Katie’s colleagues are also attending the SPC in Healthcare session to learn how to create SPC charts.
One of the key items of Katie’s organisational agenda is around the Trust’s mortality data. During the course, mortality data was discussed which Katie found very useful. This has helped Katie to look at her data in a new light, learning how to present this data in a better way and use her new knowledge on whether outliers are taken into account. After the session, Katie understood that you have to read more into data instead of taking it for face value and it’s important to know when changes are needed and what is just normal variation.
The longer term goal for Katie and her team is to use the data in a more meaningful way that is easier for staff to understand. She also feels that she can use her new knowledge when working with CSUs to look at what to target in order to improve things on a system wide basis.
Katie attended the Improvement Academy Understanding and Reducing Variation in Healthcare workshop, funded through the Yorkshire and Humber AHSN on 28th January 2019.
