Safeguarding
All staff working for ABC have completed a series of employment checks including DBS, confirmation of professional registration and the GP performers’ list. A detailed induction also ensures employees understand their individual and collective responsibilities to safeguarding.
ABC staff undergo regular mandatory safeguarding training either online or face-to-face and to a level dependent on their role. Clinical Leads oversee all of our services and can support staff with any safeguarding concerns as well as managerial and clinical supervision.
Monthly safeguarding meetings are held with Safeguarding and Service Leads to ensure it is prioritised across services and help to embed a safeguarding culture for ABC. The Safeguarding Lead and Deputy Safeguarding Lead for adults and children are also available for discussions about safeguarding concerns whether they meet the threshold for referral or not.
In clinical services, using the clinical GP systems, any safeguarding issues and actions are recorded and tasks sent to the GP practice to ensure they are shared with practices. Safeguarding audits are completed by the Quality Improvement Audit Coordinators.
Clinical Safety
The Clinical Services Handbook provides information and outlines the processes that staff need to support them in practice.
ABC ensures that infection control is monitored through inclusion of audits within service Host Site Agreements and Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs). Risk assessments of the environment are undertaken and equipment maintenance logs are held for each service.
Clinicians have access to medication alerts through the MHRA (Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency) alerting system and Nice Guidance to ensure safe and effective prescribing. Most prescribing is now undertaken using the Electronic Prescribing System, which reduces the reliance on manual FP10 prescription pads. Where manual prescribing is still necessary the required security processes are in place.
The monthly Quality Improvement Meeting and quarterly Quality Committee review all incidents and complaints and monitor the learning outcomes and actions required to improve practices and patient/staff safety as well as identifying areas for clinical audit as part of the annual Quality Improvement Plan. We have introduced a new online risk management system, Ulysses, for the reporting of incidents compliments and complaints that allows comprehensive monitoring and reporting.
We use MS Teams Broadcasting Channels to provide access to policies, safety alerts and updates as well as the Clinical Services Handbook. Learning and actions from incidents and complaints is also shared through the monthly Quality Update Newsletter.
We monitor our performance through a balanced scorecard and are developing our collaboration with other GP Federations to share knowledge, learning and benchmarking.
