Staff and patient involvement in benchmarking to improve care.

This article outlines work undertaken to relaunch Essence of Care benchmarking at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), a 1,665-bed teaching hospital based on two sites. The eight high impact actions for nurses and midwives (NHS Institute 2009) have been aligned with Essence of Care to develop comprehensive tools for quality improvement at local level. This has resulted in increased patient feedback and enhanced staff ownership and involvement in quality-improvement processes and raising standards of care. As a national pilot site for the Productive Ward programme (NHS Institute 2007), NUH has developed links between the two initiatives, reviewing ward processes, increasing direct patient feedback and providing a wealth of data relating to quality of care and patient-safety issues.