Collaborative working and clinical effectiveness are key to the matron’s role in reducing unwarranted variation in care, improving patient safety, reducing inequality in healthcare and enhancing staff wellbeing, as well as conserving resources.

Collaborative working

Collaborating with and supporting staff will demand skills in managing and leading people, role modelling and negotiation at the frontline of care. The matron should use their clinical experience and academic knowledge and seek support from their senior management team for this.

The matron should use collaboration to ensure patients and their families get quality inclusive care by:

• holding matron’s surgeries and drop-in sessions
• being aware of, and having strategies to advance equality and reduce inequality
• using IT to benchmark and achieve the best patient care outcomes
• implementing and embedding national care quality standards locally
• using podcasts to aid learning from experience, both from good practice and areas where there is room for improvement
• sharing improvement projects, new care models and pathways nationally
• gaining administrative support for the matron’s role where possible
• collaborating with quality partners, patient and public involvement groups and peers in local improvement programmes
• developing staff and educating patients about clinical effectiveness.

Delivering effective clinical care

The matron has a lead role in ensuring patients receive effective clinical care every day and must lead their staff to deliver it. Ways to do this include:

• using measures, metrics and guidelines
• sharing examples of good practice through networking
• strategy development to help meet local objectives
• developing effective local steering groups for local projects
• cross-system working that shares area-specific guidance and policies
• establishing local improvement collaboratives
• raising awareness of the benefits of education and training
• engaging with wider national campaigns, including those for nutrition and hydration, pressure ulcer prevention, falls, infection prevention and control and discharge.

Ensure patients’ nutritional needs are met through:

• having systems to carry out nutritional assessments
• being involved in commissioning patient food
• ensuring meals are accessible to patients
• ensuring meals meet patients’ cultural needs
• encouraging families to meet patients’ nutritional needs
• ensuring that ward and departmental hostesses are available to assist with meals
• ensure wards and departments have access to dietetics assessment and advice
• reviewing nutrition documentation.

Monitoring clinical effectiveness

Meetings the matron needs to attend should be clearly identified, taking account of their other clinical responsibilities. These meetings may include those with the director of nursing or chief nurse, ward, department and service leaders and the senior management team, to receive and provide updates and give feedback on care delivery. There may also be quality improvement meetings where the matrons and ward, department and service leaders should report on quality improvement methodologies and changes regarding their services. Matrons must attend and lead at incident management and root cause analysis investigation meetings. Meetings are vital for updates on professional standards and providing assurance on practice compliance to maintain clinical effectiveness.

Further information

Quality improvement resources

• Quality Service Improvement and Redesign Tools
• Sharing your quality improvement projects and learning from others

Sustaining improvement

• Handover and sustain – deployment and ‘business as usual’

Use of data in quality improvement

• Making data count