As organisations across NHS Wales continue to strengthen their Quality Management Systems (QMS), many are exploring how data can be used more effectively to support improvement, assurance and decision making.
Alongside its Quality Outcomes Framework, Aneurin Bevan University Health Board (ABUHB) has developed a Quality and Patient Safety Dashboard, providing a structured and data-driven approach to understanding quality and safety across services. The dashboard is helping teams move beyond retrospective reporting towards real-time insight to allow for targeted, evidence-based improvement.
Like many organisations, ABUHB faced the challenge of managing large volumes of information spread across numerous systems and reporting processes.
Quality and safety data existed in multiple places, requiring significant manual effort to collect, validate and report. Different reporting schedules sometimes resulted in variations in the data being presented, creating uncertainty and making it difficult for staff to maintain confidence in the information being used.
Recognising these challenges, they set out to develop a more integrated approach that could bring data together in one place, create a single source of truth, and provide meaningful insights at all levels of the organisation.
The result is a dashboard that supports both organisational oversight and local improvement, helping teams access information quickly and use it to drive action.
A key principle underpinning the dashboard's development has been ensuring that quality and safety information is accessible to the people who know their services best.
Rather than information being viewed solely through a corporate assurance lens, the ambition has been to provide teams with timely and meaningful data that can inform local decision-making and improvement activity. The dashboard allows users to explore data at different levels, helping them understand trends, identify areas of concern and focus their improvement efforts where they will have the greatest impact.
Importantly, the system enables users to answer complex questions quickly through simple filtering and visualisation tools, reducing the time spent manually extracting and analysing data.
The dashboard forms part of a wider quality management approach within ABUHB, helping link operational information with strategic oversight.
By bringing together quality and safety indicators, the system enables teams to understand what the data is telling them and what action may be required.
This creates opportunities to:
Enabling users to explore data in greater detail, the dashboard supports a more nuanced interpretation of quality and safety data, and more informed conversations about performance and improvement. For example, while reductions in harm-related incidents may represent improvement, a decrease in overall incident reporting could equally indicate reduced reporting activity rather than safer care.
As services have gained easier access to information about their own performance and activity, teams have become increasingly interested in understanding how they compare with peers and where opportunities for improvement exist.
This has helped stimulate conversations about practice, performance and learning, creating a greater sense of ownership around quality and safety data and driving a culture where data is viewed as a tool that empowers teams to improve services and outcomes.
Developing the dashboard has been a significant undertaking, requiring close collaboration between quality and safety teams, clinical services, analysts and digital colleagues who connected operational requirements and technical development, helping translate improvement needs into practical digital solutions.
The work has also underscored the importance of communication and engagement, particularly when introducing new ways of presenting and interpreting data. As systems become more sophisticated, supporting leaders, staff and board members to understand and use information effectively remains a key priority.
ABUHB's experience highlights several lessons for organisations developing their own quality and safety intelligence systems:
As the dashboard continues to evolve, ABUHB is exploring how data, quality management and organisational learning can become even more closely aligned, with a long-term ambition to create an environment where information supports continuous improvement at every level of the organisation, from frontline teams through to Board and executive oversight.
By bringing together quality, safety and improvement intelligence into a single system, the Health Board is demonstrating how digital tools can help organisations build a more proactive, informed and learning-focused approach to quality management.
The National QMS Programme wants to share more examples of innovative practice, tools, resources and learning from across NHS Wales on the QMS Hub. Sharing your experience can help other organisations develop their own approaches and strengthen quality management across the system. Please get in touch with the Quality and Safety team by emailing NHSPI.Qualityandsafety@wales.nhs.uk if you would like to contribute to a future feature.