NHS Vale of York CCG uses a quality and equality impact assessment (QEIA) tool to assess and measure the potential impact of proposed service changes or reviews, as well as the need for patient and public involvement.

The QEIA enables our staff to follow a simple process to carry out a quality and equality impact assessment at the start of any project. 

The tool covers five key areas.

• Safety – Rating the impact of the proposal on patient safety
• Effectiveness – Rating the impact of the proposal on the clinical effectiveness of patient care
• Experience – Rating the impact of the proposal on the patient experience of care delivery
• Other impacts– Rating the impact of the proposal on other services, patient groups, staff or reputation of the organisation. This includes consideration of if the legal duty to involve patients and the public applies.
• Equality and diversity– Rating the impact on those in a specific group as outlined in the Equality Act 2010 and also including other hard to reach groups.

To make sure we consider patient experience, equality and diversity, we suggest that our staff use these useful tools.

• Quality and equality impact assessment, to assess and measure the potential impact of proposed service changes or reviews. 
• Improving equality across protected characteristics - Equality Impact Assessment form prompt sheet 
• Sources of information for health inequalities data
• Population health – understanding our NHS Vale of York population.

Patient and public involvement

We also use the QEIA tool to consider the benefits of, and identify if there is a need for patient and public participation in its commissioning activity. If it is agreed that public and patient involvement is required, it triggers the need for a patient and public involvement form to be completed. We provide our staff with a suite of forms to help them in their decision making for engagement. The engagement training toolkit can be found here.