Background
The Getting it Right First Time (GIRFT) programme is a national programme designed to improve the quality of care within the NHS by reducing unnecessary variations in services. By sharing good practice and new approaches between trusts, GIRFT identifies changes that will help improve care and patient outcomes, as well as delivering efficiencies such as a reduction in unnecessary procedures and patient length of stay, and the consequent cost savings.
The GIRFT methodology has been applied across more than 40 surgical and medical specialties and cross-cutting themes including diagnostics, day case surgery, outpatient services and clinical coding.
Each workstream is led by one or more frontline clinicians who are experts in the specialty they are reviewing. The clinical leads for ENT are:
- Jeremy Davis - GIRFT ENT Clinical Lead
- Su De - GIRFT Paediatric ENT Clinical Lead
GIRFT collaborates and works in partnership with NHS trusts, specialist clinical professional bodies (Royal Colleges and societies), and partner NHS organisations in collating, scrutinising and sharing data, highlighting both underperformance and excellence. This evidence has a major impact in identifying variation in clinical outcomes and has provided the focus for hospital teams, departments and clinical networks to tackle unwarranted variation, where it exists, through benchmarking and adopting best practice.
GIRFT works closely with professional organisations to provide a wealth of co-badged pathways, guidance and operational insight to enable strong and informed leadership in improvement. Resources to support improvement in ENT can be found here: ENT Workstream - Getting It Right First Time - GIRFT
GIRFT’s work benefits the NHS through improved productivity, efficiency and capacity, which in turn benefits patients, who can receive treatments quicker, have more equity of access to high quality care, and have better outcomes.
More information on GIRFT’s work and methodology can be found on the programme’s website.
ENT specific links
Pathways
Guidance