Duncan Gilbert

Key Responsibilities

1. Leadership and Strategy

• Share and embody the organisational approach to systematic quality management.
• Provide vision and leadership in the implementation of a robust and effective Quality Management System across the Trust.
• Lead on the development, sharing and implementation of the Trust's strategy, ensuring broad engagement across all levels of the organisation, and across the places and systems within which the trust operates
• Provide guidance and direction on the execution of trust strategy, including the effective communication and socialisation of the strategy, helping stakeholders to understand what it means to them
• Measure and report to the trust board on progress against implementation of the strategy and achievement of strategic objectives – ensuring a clear understanding of key aims and progress towards them.

2. Quality Planning

• Provide leadership for quality planning across the organisation
• Help teams align their work to the organisation's mission and strategic plan
• Work to refine, strengthen and continuously improve planning processes – particularly in ensuring balance across the trusts four key strategic outcomes, mobilising corporate support in the development and delivery of plans, ensuring people participation in planning, promoting collaboration across Directorates, and alignment of Trust plans with those at place.
• Enable and support data and intelligence driven planning that aligns with the trust strategy and what matters most to the population we serve.

3. Quality Control

• Socialise a shared understanding of the concept of quality control across clinical services
• Engage clinical staff in quality control activity, by fostering understanding of its purpose and benefits
• Continue ongoing work with clinical services in the design and implementation of data driven quality control processes, that enable real-time understanding of quality and safety, and support corrective action where required
• Scale up learning about excellent quality control practices to other inpatient units, and to spread effective quality control practice, across all levels of the organisation
• Work closely with Director of Patient Safety to ensure processes support the trusts patient safety agenda

4. Quality Assurance

• Provide overall leadership for the Quality Assurance Team, and line-manage the Head of Quality Assurance
• Ensure that the Quality Assurance Team provides high quality, patient centred, responsive, and customer focused service
• Support and develop the Quality Assurance leadership team; and have line management responsibility for the Head of Quality Assurance. Ultimately responsible for the people and culture of the QA team.
• Lead the application of quality improvement methodology to the department's functioning and development, to ensure that the department is continuously reviewing performance, identifying improvement opportunities and testing ideas to better meet the needs of its stakeholders
• Provide regular Quality Assurance Reports to the Trust Board, and other Committees as required
• Support the Chairs of the Trustwide Quality Committee with its administration, ensuring the Committee meets its terms of reference

5. People participation in quality management

• Build relationships with service users and carers, and relevant representative groups, and engage people in the concept and benefits of the quality management system approach
• Develop and deliver a training package on the ELFT quality management system, to skill up and enable effective collaboration and co-production in quality management activity across the organisation
• Ensure people participation in all parts of the ELFT quality management system.

Key responsibilities

• Providing a strategic and operational lead on corporate quality assurance, and develop and oversee implementation of the Trust's Quality Assurance (QA) programme
• Supporting local Directorate activity in the area, and work alongside other Governance Leads contributing to the QA programme to ensure their activity supports regulatory compliance.
• Ensuring the Trust meets its clinical regulatory requirements as set out in the Health and Social Care Act 2008 with full operational responsibility for monitoring and compliance with clinical regulatory standards and the lead source of expert advice and guidance in relation to clinical regulation.
• Management of the administration of maintaining registration with the Care Quality Commission, and co-ordinate arrangements for any announced CQC regulatory visits.
• Providing high quality support and leadership to the Quality Assurance team, including team development and well-being
• Working alongside the Associate Director for Assurance and other key colleagues to ensure effective quality assurance systems and processes that support regulatory compliance
• Developing a system of Quality Assurance metrics that form the foundation of reporting to the Quality Committee, and provide ongoing assurance of the quality and safety of services to the Trust Board
• Overseeing the system for collection and utilisation of patient experience feedback to support local and Trust-wide quality improvement
• Leading the clinical audit programme across the Trust, including clinical audit, service user led audit and national audit programmes
• Leading on quality reporting – including the quality report for the Service Delivery Board and Trust Board, the annual Quality accounts, and quality reporting to the Consortium Clinical Quality Review meeting.
• Administration of the Quality Committee, supporting the Committee Chair to ensure that the Committee fulfils its quality assurance functions, and supports and drives quality assurance and regulatory compliance

An interim role to cover a temporary gap in provision, I held this role alongside my substantive Head of Quality Assurance role.

The role covered our incident reporting/management, complaints and health and safety functions.

In the role I provided day to day support and leadership to the team, and focused on the effective functioning of incident management, complaints and learning processes.

A fixed term secondment role in support of the Trust's preparations for its first Comprehensive Inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC)

Key Responsibilities

• Identify and communicated clear objectives and priorities
• Design and implement a project plan
• Design and support the project structure
• Provide leadership and management to a team of people
• Report on progress to Executive Lead, and wider organisation
• Communicate effectively across the organisation through a range of media
• Design and deliver a system of quality assurance/compliance monitoring, including a robust programme of internal inspection benefiting from robust staff and service user collaboration
• Collect, appraise and communicate a range of data at the request of the CQC
• Effectively co-ordinate the comprehensive inspection

Key responsibilities

• Develop and deliver systems of clinical governance and quality assurance
• Co-ordinate the Trust's level 2 and level 3 NHS Litigation Authority risk management assessments
• Oversee clinical audit, including development of an audit strategy and programme of clinical audit, developing and auditing internal quality standards, and the effective reporting of audit findings and recommendations for action
• Manage the Datix incident reporting system, and oversee a project improving the Trust's incident report form, and the capture and use of incident data (specifically the development of incident dashboards)
• Contribute to the development of the Trust's incident reporting, 48hr reporting, and Serious Incident reviewing processes
• Produce high quality written reports, verbal reports and presentations to the Trust Board, and other Corporate and Directorate groups and committees
• Establish comprehensive governance and quality report templates
• Contribute to clinical governance and assurance due diligence in relation to the acquisition of new business
• Administrate the Trust's Care Quality Commission registration at the outset of its regulation of health and social care, the subsequent registration of acquired services and the ongoing administration of the Trust's registration and the bureaucracy of clinical regulation
• Build and maintain relationships at all levels of the organisation, often promoting understanding of, and engagement with, governance and assurance activity. As well as relationships outside of the Trust, with other providers, and notably the Care Quality Commission

Leading the ward team, striving to deliver personalised, patient-centred care, focused on quality and safety.

Delivering mental health nursing care to patients across acute in-patient settings