The Chief Nursing Officer for England’s Excellence Programme

Evidence tells us that those who strive for excellence achieve better outcomes. Better outcomes for patients, residents, service users, their families and unpaid carers as improvements are made in care and treatment offers.

Where a culture of excellence is embraced, people thrive. Supporting people to use every opportunity to raise standards and to push boundaries. Ensuring services continue to deliver high quality, person-centred, evidence-based approaches which both meet need and exceed expectations. Ensuring every voice counts.

As part of the Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) for England’s work to improve excellence quickly and widely, the CNO Excellence Programme helps staff from across health and care work together in different professional teams to support excellence.

The programme supports important government plans like the 10 Year Health Plan for England (2025), the NHS Long Term Workforce Plan (2023) and People at the Heart of Care: adult social care reform white paper (2021). It brings together experts, key stakeholders and colleagues from across health and care.

This programme learns from the best health and care programmes worldwide to promote evidence-based excellence. It supports improvement at system, organisational, and individual levels, while developing local recognition schemes for excellent care.

The CNO Excellence Programme and its resources can be used by anyone. It supports all health and care staff, regardless of role or workplace, to develop and keep excellent standards.

The CNO Excellence Programme identifies 7 essential components for excellence:

Culture and environment: Building working environments where people work well together and treat each other with respect. Places where people feel safe to speak up and do the right thing, even when it’s difficult. These workplaces celebrate good work, include everyone, and use resources well to make things fairer for all.
Health and wellbeing: Making the health and wellbeing of our staff and communities the most important thing in everything we do. This means keeping people safe from harm at work, helping people do things that improve their health and wellbeing, and making sure everyone can work in ways that help them stay healthy and well.
Knowledge mobilisation and research: Creating and keeping workplaces where research that focuses on people is used every day in practice and when making decisions.
Leadership: Helping people at every level become visible, team-focused and caring leaders who support curious, committed, purposeful and determined ways of thinking. This means working together in ways that include everyone, being good role models, and showing values and behaviours that promote fairness and equality.
Innovation: Supporting new ideas and new ways of working quickly and widely to help improve health results and help the economy grow.
Quality and safety: Focusing on quality and always looking for ways to make things better by finding opportunities and areas to improve. Trying new things and raising standards to help our communities.
Workforce learning and development: Creating strong and creative systems that help staff develop and grow their knowledge and skills. Making sure they have the resources and tools they need to make positive changes happen. This means making sure practice gets better through continuous learning and development.

Join the CNO for Excellence Programme community hub on the NHS Futures platform to learn more and access the resources. To find out how to get involved with the programme email: england.nursingpolicystrategy@nhs.net