Mastering NHS quality committees

A summary of GGi’s latest webinar for NHS non-executive directors

GGi’s latest webinar for NHS non-executive directors, Mastering NHS Quality Committees, held on Friday 7 November, explored how boards can strengthen assurance, accountability, and learning through their quality committees.

The session was chaired by GGi CEO Professor Andrew Corbett-Nolan, with reflections from Professor John Atherton, Vice-Chair and Chair of the Clinical Quality and Patient Safety Committee at University Hospitals Birmingham.

John opened with lessons from Birmingham’s improvement journey — from an inadequate to good CQC well-led rating in under two years — crediting stronger leadership, inclusivity, and governance discipline.

He emphasised that quality committees must ‘do the heavy lifting’ on assurance, ensuring no surprises for the board, and act as the conscience of the organisation. Key priorities included listening to staff and patients, embedding speaking-up cultures, focusing on outcomes over process, and tackling health inequalities head-on.

In the following discussion, NEDs shared practical experiences on managing data overload and the shift toward exception-based digital reporting. Others highlighted the need to integrate quality improvement with assurance, automate data collection, and strengthen relationships between non-executives and executives.

Several contributions explored health inequalities — from using deprivation indices and ethnicity-based outcome data to aligning quality metrics with population health objectives.

In the chat, attendees debated how quality committees can remain focused on outcomes rather than paperwork, the value of patient stories, and how QI programmes can serve as Trojan horses for cultural change.

One participant asked whether NHS quality is truly improving — prompting reflection on the collective responsibility of boards to move “from good enough to excellent.”