Great Ormond Street Hospital (GOSH) always aims to provide the best possible care. To help us monitor the quality of our services, we measure what we do and how we do it. This is presented in our Quality Account.
One aim of the Quality Account is to make sure our clinical outcomes keep us among the world’s top five children’s hospitals.
A clinical outcome is the “change in the health of an individual, group of people or population which is attributable to an intervention or series of interventions”.*
* Taken from: Frommer, Michael; Rubin, George; Lyle, David (1992). "The NSW Health Outcomes program". New South Wales Public Health Bulletin 3: 135. doi:10.1071/NB92067.
We recently undertook expert service user consultations with a small group of patients attending GOSH services and their family members as a first step to exploring patient and parent views of patient reported outcome and experience measures (PROMs and PREMs), and to inform a multiprofessional workshop on PROMs and PREMs in paediatric health care. The consultations were held in form of two focus groups, one with young people who are currently, or have been, patients of GOSH, the other with their parents or carers and wider family members. The report summarising key findings from these focus groups is available here.
Measuring clinical outcomes
All the clinical services in the hospital are developing ways to measure the outcomes of their care to show how well they are doing.
We have provided examples of clinical outcomes from some of our specialties:
Specialist care
The specialised care we provide sometimes means we cannot compare what we are doing with other UK centres.
So we have looked for ways to compare our clinical performance both against agreed standards or, where possible, with other organisations nationally and internationally to look at how we are doing over time.
Please let us know if you found this section helpful and easy to understand, or if there is any additional information you would like but couldn't find, by emailing
Meredith Mora, Clinical Outcomes Development Lead.
