360 Assurance specialise in health and social care. We are hosted by an NHS Trust (making us all NHS employees) and have 29 NHS clients with recurrent internal audit contracts.

360 Assurance has responded to the evolution of assurance needs in the health and social care sector through employment of a specific Clinical Quality team whose primary focus is on supporting clients to continuously improve the quality of the care and treatment they provide to patients and service users.

The Clinical Quality team at 360 Assurance (all registered clinical professionals) has evolved over the last 10 years, picking up the award for ‘outstanding team – public sector’ in the Audit and Risk awards in 2015 along the way.

As well as being able to offer consultancy, advice, audit and training specifically in areas focusing on the quality of services, we continually strive to consider issues around clinical quality on a regional or national scale, involving ourselves in multi-agency working groups and initiatives as much as possible in order to represent the needs of our clients and seek solutions to recurrent risks that we identify through our audit and consultancy work.

Team members have experience of working in a wide variety of health and social care settings, as well as within inspection and regulation services. These experienced clinicians are able to combine their clinical knowledge and expertise with an in-depth understanding of governance, risk management and quality improvement methodology (including human factors and systems thinking) to facilitate the identification of system weaknesses. We will always work with you in a supportive way to generate a robust set of improvement actions which address the reasons outcomes/performance are not being achieved and which will, ultimately, improve patient outcomes. The size of our team and the breadth of specialist skills it encompasses allows us to be flexible and responsive to your needs.

Who we are

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How we can help

Below are lists of areas/topics we have experience of reviewing. This is not exhaustive and we tailor all work to meet your needs, reflecting whether you are looking for some supportive work as you develop or undertake change or an audit offering an independent assurance opinion.

Patient Safety: safeguarding, falls, pressure area care, infection prevention and control, reducing restrictive practice, incident management (including support with producing your patient safety incident response plan), WHO surgical checklists, ligatures, medical devices, medicines management, learning from deaths

We also undertake independent incident investigations

Patient Experience (inc patient rights): Mental Health Act, consent and Mental Capacity Act, Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards, complaints, claims, patient feedback, patient/carer involvement and engagement

We also undertake independent complaint investigations

Clinical Effectiveness: clinical audit, NICE standards, outcomes identification and monitoring

Well-led: clinical/quality governance, support with development of quality strategy, policy development, service review, culture, quality improvement

Due to the experience of our staff we are able to undertake mock CQC visits/robust quality assurance visits or simply support services in preparing for CQC inspections or pulling together evidence.

During 2022/23 we led a project across the East Midlands and South Yorkshire to support health and social care organisations with the implementation of the Liberty Protection Safeguards (before they were indefinitely postponed!). Further details of this work can be found on our dedicated page: Liberty Protection Safeguards – Welcome to 360 Assurance

If you would like further details regarding any of the services available from the Clinical Quality team, or would like to discuss joining the team (either in a substantive role or on the bank), please contact Kristina Dickinson (07748 622985 or kristina.dickinson@nhs.net)