Accountable in Another Way

Accountable in Another Way is one of the three programmes of the NFU Quality of Care Consortium. What does ‘Accountable in Another Way’ mean in practice for healthcare professionals? 

• More direct participation by patients; 

• A shift from reporting thousands of indicators to fewer, well-chosen data; 

• Quantitative and qualitative information instead of just figures;

• Instead of top-down control, the lead is transferred to clinical teams; 

• Creating an improvement culture instead of a control system.

Experiments

In the Decide Together and Steering towards Quality programmes, the Quality of Care Consortium has laid the basis for this movement. Subsequently, USBO and Nivel in the preliminary study for Accountable in Another Way explored three potential routes to arrive at new ways of accountability. They also made proposals for implementing Accountable in Another Way in practice. As a result of all that preparatory work, several experiments are now running within this programme.

One of these successful experiments is Useful Registration (ZIRE), being conducted by RadboudUMC, specialist hospital Rijnstate and the UMCG. With ZIRE, patients and caregivers plus the supervisor are closely involved in the accountability of Quality of Care. As a result: more value is added for the patients and for the nursing personnel. The latter had time and interest again to reflect and improve. Plus: they felt more involved, and the quality of care remained high, despite letting the existing indicators go.

On 21 January 2020 a Round Table meeting was organised. It was agreed there by healthcare professionals, patient representatives and managers of hospitals, healthcare insurers and supervisors to continue with Accountable in Another Way in the daily practice.

Would you like to remain informed of the latest news about this programme? Are you curious about the other experiments?