The clinical governance of multidisciplinary care

Providers of health and social care services aim to deliver personalised care that is safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led. Multidisciplinary teams often have to work together, either within or across multiple provider organisations in order to achieve this aim. It is valuable to have a framework of clinical governance for such circumstances that enables a shared assurance of quality. To achieve these aims, the purpose of this paper is to present a clinical governance matrix framework developed by the author’s experiences in clinical practice, in service change and in management and leadership.

There are seven pillars of clinical governance; patient and public involvement, staffing and staff management, clinical effectiveness and research, using information and IT, education and training, risk management and audit. These seven pillars of clinical governance can be mapped against the five quality domains of safe, effective, caring, responsive and well led to create a matrix that in turn describes the framework we need for quality assurance.

The matrix is populated with outcome measures and these are monitored to achieve balance across the framework. The tool can be used at the level of an individual practitioner all the way up to multiple organisations in collaboration. The detail in each cell of the matrix will change accordingly and critically should be developed and owned by the subject of the framework.

This clinical governance matrix is presented as a methodology to monitor quality assurance in the settings of health and social care.