Quality Standards
The Royal College of Ophthalmologists champions excellence in care. In order to provide the best care for patients, and to generate improvements in care, it is important to be able to measure the quality of clinical services provided. In addition, measuring quality provides quality assurance data for patients, regulators and commissioners. There are many possible ways of measuring service quality including clinical audit, outcome measures and patient surveys.
The College’s Quality and Safety Group provides a set of simple self-assessment tools for a number of clinical services: accident and emergency/urgent care, cataract, glaucoma, adnexal, medical retina (including age-related macular degeneration [AMD]), diabetic retinopathy, vitreoretinal surgery, neuro-ophthalmology, children and young adults and adults with learning difficulties. The tools focus on service provision not outcomes and do not attempt to assess every aspect of service but try to focus on a small number of key areas. It is not expected that most clinical services will answer ‘Yes’ to all of the question, and the results should be used in conjunction with other methods of quality assessment to support learning and improvement.
Please send feedback on the form and how you have used it to assess and change your services to Beth Barnes, Head of Professional Support beth.barnes@rcophth.ac.uk.
- Quality Standard for Adnexal Services
- Quality Standard for Cataract Services
- Quality Standards for Cornea Services
- Quality Standard for Glaucoma Services
- Quality Standard for Medical Retina Disease Services
- Quality Standard for Neuro-ophthalmology Services
- Quality Standard for Vitreoretinal Services
- Quality Standards for Diabetic Retinopathy Services
- Quality Standards for Services to Patients with Learning Disabilities
- Quality Standards & Quality Indicators for Ophthalmic Care and Services for Children and Young People
- Quality Standard for A&E/Urgent Care Services
- Quality standard for people with sight loss and dementia in an ophthalmology department This quality standard has been developed by The Royal College of Ophthalmologists and VISION 2020 UK to help ophthalmology departments provide high-quality care for patients with dementia
Using the RCOphth’s Quality and Safety Group’s set of self-assessment tools for clinical services, we have launched a simple electronic tool (E-tool) to help ophthalmic units assess service quality quickly and easily. The e-tool also provides a method of monitoring service quality periodically, for example, following the introduction of service changes. For more information and user guide.
Useful Links
England National diabetic eye screening programme and Roles and responsibilities of clinical leads of diabetic eye screening programmes
Scottish Diabetic Retinopathy Screening Collaboration
Northern Ireland Diabetic eye screening