Our Service Pledge
Duty of Candour Statement by East Berkshire Primary Care Out of Hours Service
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Candour is defined in the Robert Francis Report as: “The volunteering of all relevant information to persons who have or may have been harmed by the provision of services, whether or not the information has been requested and whether or not a complaint or a report about that provision has been made.”
Our values and beliefs
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At East Berkshire Primary Care Out of Hours service we openly support the Duty of Candour and will always strive to be open, honest and transparent. We support the ‘Being Open’ policy and actively encourage our staff to be truthful in their dealings with patients, if and when things go wrong.
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We want all incidents and complaints to be investigated and any lessons learned from this process to be shared within the organisation and patients alike.
Our Governance
We place Governance at the top of our agenda not only in the delivery of high-quality care for all our patients/clients but also on ourselves internally. We believe that good governance (integrated) fosters inward facing scrutiny, honesty and transparency. We also ensure that our Directors comply with the ‘fit and proper persons test’ and we aspire to being a ‘well led’ CQC regulated organisation
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We actively support Whistleblowing and want to know if things are not quite right so that we can make them so.
Our Clients and Patients
Our Clients and Patients expect and deserve that, as a health service provider organisation, we are honest, open and truthful in all our dealings with them and we have put in place the systems and processes to enable this. To this end we have a sub-committee of the Executive Council called the Quality, Governance, Patient Safety and Risk Committee. This committee meets monthly and discusses all of the areas within its name, and we have both staff and patient representation on this committee to make sure we are engaging with both our staff and patients.
Our Assurance
We continually strive to assure ourselves that we are an open and honest organisation and one of the ways we achieve this is by asking our Patients about their experience which we do on a post visit basis. We also carry out staff audits and we listen. ‘You say we did’ is how we implement what our patients/clients and staff tell us.