Highlighting quality: strategies, standards and practices

The NHS continues to face challenges on many fronts in terms of planning and delivering high quality health and social care across hospital and community-based services. The reasons are multifaceted, but contributory issues include an ageing population who present with a mixture of acute and long-term conditions that require more complex or specialist management; significant public health concerns arising from dietary and alcohol related problems combined with a relatively sedentary lifestyle amongst the population; alterations in patients’, public and political expectations of the health and social care services in terms of accessibility, efficiency and effectiveness of care; scientific advances in options for care along with IT and technological innovations that seem to outstrip the ability of the service to implement changes at a pace that enables benefits to be evaluated whilst providing sufficient time and rigour to detect and manage any associated but unforeseen problems. The result is a picture of increasing financial, time and other resource pressures across all aspects of the NHS, whether in terms of delivering care or supporting the education and training of the current and future workforce.When faced with this somewhat challenging outlook, how might the simulation community seek to respond? The answer lies in taking a broader view at how the health and social care system is being asked to adapt to these conditions both strategically and in operational terms. This should enable recalibration of how, when and where the use of highquality simulation-based interventions or programmes will contribute to potential solutions in local contexts or enhance national policy-level responses to address wider service needs. Prime examples of such an analysis concerns how simulation can support key policy initiatives such as workforce transformation, return-to-work programmes, and the emergence of new curricula for health care professions, each of which are seeking to be …