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Clinical Governance

Critically analyse how clinical governance can ensure accountability of individuals and teams and that nursing practice is safe and of a high standard?
As Defined by Scally and Donaldson 1998, clinical governance is:

“A framework through which NHS organisations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish” (NHS Executive, 1998).

The aim of the NHS is to ensure continuous improvement in the standards of clinical care, to prevent errors in clinical practice, to raise standards and improving outcomes offering access to a range of healthcare services (Freedom D, 2002). This paper intends to critically evaluate ways in which clinical governance ensures professional accountability taking into account current health policy and legislation. This assignment aims to provide knowledge into issues in relation to the management and supervision within the care of adult nursing through the use of relevant literature. Furthermore, this paper will critically analyse three components of clinical governance: risk management, clinical supervision and evidence-base practice.

Governed through an umbrella of clinical standards, the NHS ensures that these standards: risk management, clinical supervision and evidence-base practice are of a safe and high standard. (Freedom D, 2002). In 1948, the NHS was traditionally devised with no particular agenda for quality, assuming that quality would devise through the provision of the training and education of all NHS staff (Department of Health, 1997). It could be argued that clinical practitioners where traditionally part of a role culture, being unable to develop and exercise their clinical practice and are said to have been “belonged to hierarchical structures where the only way to a higher pay packet was not clinical excellence but a move into management” (Wattis et al 1999). Since...