Organisational determinants of clinical quality and performance improvement in maternity services

Arrival: 12pm Seminar: 12.15pm - 1.15pm.

Tea, coffee and sandwiches provided (please register if you want these, and to guarantee a seat!)

Speakers

Mhorag Goff, Research Associate, AMBS

Abstract

Great advances have been made in developing measures of clinical quality and performance over the last decade. However, rather less progress has been made in understanding and explaining the large variations almost always seen in measures of clinical performance and quality. Observed variations are often attributed to organisational attributes like leadership, culture, or management commitment; or to characteristics of the patient population, such as demography or locality. But these organisational and contextual attributes are often poorly defined and rarely measured, and the mechanisms by which they are thought to affect clinical quality and performance are not well understood. The Improvement Capability Project uses case studies, taking its clinical focus as maternity services. We explore the relationship between measures of clinical quality and performance in maternity services and a number of attributes of clinical service organisation and leadership, for which we use the collective term “improvement capability”. This may provide new approaches to leading and sustaining quality improvement, and to transferring learning from high performing to lower performing services or providers.

About Mhorag Goff

Mhorag Goff joined Alliance Manchester Business School as a Research Associate in the Health Management Group in June 2015, having previously completed a PhD at Salford University on user experiences of Electronic Patient Records in the NHS in England. Mhorag has an MSc in Information Systems and has worked in intelligence for Greater Manchester Police and for BT in Business Improvement and Service Management roles. Her teaching covers a range of Business, Management, Information Systems and Qualitative Research Methods topics. Her research interests lie in critical information systems and the sociology of technology and organisations, with a particular interest in Actor-Network Theory and critical theoretical and methodological approaches.