Clinical Governance at The OT Practice
by Paul Cooper, Professional Head of Occupational Therapy at The OT Practice
In this article Paul, our Professional Head of Occupational Therapy, reflects on the structures, process and systems The OT Practice has put in place under his clinical leadership, to ensure we are achieving a high level of professionalism and robust clinical governance.
At The OT Practice, we are committed to providing high-quality, ethical occupational therapy services. These values form the foundation of everything we do, from matching the right therapist to each referral at the outset, to delivering person-centred assessments, goal-setting, and treatment.
Whether you're a case manager, public sector organisation or an individual receiving our services, you can trust that our OTs will provide the highest standard of cost-effective care. Our approach is evidence-based, client-centred, and focused on achieving clear, meaningful outcomes.
To achieve these outcomes on quality, we adopt a clear and structured clinical governance framework. Clinical governance is defined as, ‘A framework through which health care organisations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care.’ (Adapted from Scally and Donaldson, 1998, as cited in Health And Care Defined: Jargon Buster, The King's Fund)
Through our framework, we have established the structures, processes, and systems needed to manage quality and continually improve the work of our OTs, all while upholding high standards of care. A brief overview on each of these pillars is outlined below. For more detail we can share our clinical governance policy on request.
The TOTP Pillars of Clinical Governance
Education and Training:
We empower our occupational therapists in their professional development through regular training and peer support, aiming for continuous improvement and upholding high standards to ensure the delivery of top-quality occupational therapy services.
Clinical Effectiveness:
We strive for client-centred service delivery using evidence-based resources, ensuring clinically effective practice through continuous improvement, outcomes based practice, stakeholder feedback, and ROI evaluation to optimise quality care and accountability.
Risk Management:
We manage risks through policies, protocols, and regular clinical meetings. Any learning from incidents, near misses, safeguarding alerts, or complaints are shared across the team, and when appropriate, directly with our OTs, to enhance our services and drive continuous improvements.
People:
We invest in our staff's competence and their continuous growth and development. This approach benefits both our OTs and, ultimately, the clients who receive our services. The collaborative and professional culture at The OT Practice is centred around working in the best interests of our client
Information Management:
We ensure high-quality clinical care through meticulous information management, including detailed case notes and reporting. We instil in our OTs the importance of recording interventions and interactions accurately, timely, and clearly, while maintaining client confidentiality and adhering to GDPR principles.
Clinical Audit / Quality Improvement:
We commit to regular audits to monitor and improve practice quality, ensuring efficiency, regulatory compliance, and optimal client outcomes through performance reviews, quality assurance, and clinical meetings.
Client, Customer and Occupational Therapist involvement:
We involve all our stakeholders in identifying successes and opportunities for improvement, ensuring quality care through open processes, client and therapist feedback, and cooperation with other healthcare providers and partners.
Implementation of the Clinical Governance Pillars
Clinical governance is led by our Professional Head of Occupational Therapy, with oversight from the Executive Director. It is their responsibility to ensure the principles outlined in this clinical governance framework are effectively implemented across the many parts of the business.
As a business, we have established meetings to maintain and seek continued improvement in clinical practices. These include quarterly Clinical Governance meetings attended by The OT Practice's directors, covering all pillars detailed above. At these meetings, ongoing learning, areas for development, and priorities are established. There are also monthly meetings focusing on risk management, safeguarding, incidents, complaints, and data breaches.
However, the process for good governance isn’t something that just happens in meetings by senior staff. It’s also about the way we operate as a wider team in daily interactions with our customers, the therapists we work with, and the clients we ultimately serve. High-quality, ethical practice is core to the work we do and cuts across all our teams and their everyday work.
Why we are different
We stand out in the independent occupational therapy sector by constantly pushing an innovative approach to improve the quality and delivery of our services. A few examples of these in recent years include forming a robust team of clinical leads to provide advice and latest practice developments for our therapists, offering peer-to-peer advice, and strengthening our QA process with clinical oversight of our reports. We have strengthened goal setting and introduced quantitative outcomes to measure progress, as well as creating processes for clearer standard and complex assessments. Our innovation continues in 2025 with new ways for our therapists to write reports, with more information on this coming soon.
If you would like to learn more, please get in touch. We regularly attend Case Manager CPD meetings or lunch & learn events to present on specialist topics and would welcome the opportunity to go into more detail about our approach to clinical governance.
