By Dr Eimhin Walsh, Information Governance Manager, National Screening Service
Behind every piece of personal data lies a person. Their personal information can be sensitive and deserves to be treated respectfully and in accordance with the law. Information governance, in a healthcare setting, is all about ensuring that healthcare organisations collect and use personal information in accordance with high standards. This involves designing and implementing systems, structures, policies and procedures that ensure personal health information is handled legally, securely, efficiently and effectively in a manner that delivers the best possible care to the service-user.
Information governance practitioners aim to maintain the confidentiality, availability, and integrity of personal information. That means we work to ensure that personal information is only disclosed to those who need it; that it is of sufficient quality to be used appropriately for the healthcare provider’s objectives; and that it is readily available and accessible to be used by the healthcare provider in delivering its service.
Good information governance is a core feature of patient safety and quality. In the context of the National Screening Service (NSS) and our four programmes (BreastCheck, BowelScreen, CervicalCheck and Diabetic RetinaScreen), a safe and high-quality population screening programme processes significant volumes of personal information.
The systems in place must ensure that the right person gets invited to the right screening at the right time, and that their journey is managed from invitation, to screening, to access to diagnostic services and onwards to treatment if required. The success of the screening programme is significantly dependent on the quality of the data in that system.
To support the system, we need robust structures of management and oversight that assure data quality, comply with regulatory standards for information management, as well as an organisational culture that is aligned to continually improving its practices.
Within the NSS we have 1.8 million people actively engaged with our programmes – 51% of the adult population. We have a responsibility towards those participants to safeguard their data and use it to improve the quality of our services.
In its guidance on information governance, the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) notes that “accurate, relevant and timely data is essential in order to improve health and social care, to inform decision-making, monitor diseases, organise services, inform policy-making, conduct high-quality research and plan for future health and social care needs”. In short: good information governance contributes to improving patient care and keeping people safe.
Over the last two years, the NSS has been building an information governance framework that aims to:
- build an organisational structure to achieve compliance with regulatory requirements and best practice in data management
- increase awareness and confidence among staff about how to manage patient data appropriately
- enhance trust in the effectiveness of our management of data
- ensure the confidentiality, availability and integrity of the data we hold, process, and share to achieve our healthcare objectives.
To achieve this, we developed a cross-functional project steering team and mapped our current compliance against HIQA’s information management standards. This helped to define a project plan with 68 actions across nine work packages. Through completing these actions, we have developed our information governance framework for the NSS.
As more and more healthcare organisations explore how information governance can improve their organisations, we would love to share our experience and learn from others. Please get in touch with us: Eimhin.walsh@screeningservice.ie