Clinical Governance

Clinical governance was introduced in April 1999 as a central component in the UK government's planned reforms of the NHS, yet many of the healthcare workers affected by it are hardly aware of it. Clinical governance is an initiative for ensuring individual and collective responsibility for the quality of healthcare within any NHS practice or institution. This text aims to provide a clear guide to what this approach is, what its general implications are, and what it means in practice to the individual healthcare worker. The book explains the key concepts and terminology, with a positive emphasis on the potential benefits of the initiative, and is bound together by the key "vertical" themes of access, equity, continuous quality improvement, effectiveness and outcomes, accountability and responsibility, and the doctor-patient relationship. The text is illustrated by case histories.