NHS West Midlands houses the West Midlands Postgraduate Medical Deanery and is ultimately responsible to the General Medical Council (GMC) as regulatory body of all medical education and training.
NHS West Midlands invests a significant amount of money into postgraduate medical education every year. Therefore, robust quality monitoring and enhancement processes are in place to monitor the quality of this medical education and training and ensure value for money.
Through structured Quality Qanagement and Enhancement Framework and associated processes, NHS West Midlands Postgraduate Deanery ensures that the educational outcomes required within the curricula for its vast array of training programmes are achieved by its Local Education Providers (LEPs) and in turn is producing a fit for purpose and highly skilled medical workforce.
The Quality Management and Enhancement Framework provides the structure to enable robust assurances that requirements are being fulfilled and education quality is enhanced for both Foundation and Specialty training, which in turn are utilised to provide assurance to the GMC.
As part of its quality management framework, the Deanery utilises a variety of quality review interventions based on continual review and targeted review dependant on perceived risk to ensure the delivery of the education and training at its LEPs is of a high standard and meets the needs of stakeholders and regulators, enhances the quality of education and in turn improves the quality of patient care.
The Deanery recognised the importance of not only reviewing areas where quality may require improvement, but also reviewing areas of enhanced and notable practice. Therefore, in addition, this review framework is also be utilised to review perceived areas of notable practice in order to investigate and share this practice with all educational areas within the Deanery. Where notable practice is identified, the appropriate level of the quality review framework will be invoked.
The following diagram illustrates the levels of the quality review framework:
Further information on the framework can be found at the West Midland Deanery Website.