Invited Reviews - College contacts and services

The Medical Royal Colleges are committed to enabling healthcare providers to deliver the highest standards of patient care. The delivery of good care is not always straightforward – there are daily challenges for healthcare professionals, the teams they work in and the strategic design of networks.

A Royal College invited review can provide a provider, commissioner or service planner with expert independent and cost effective advice in a confidential report.

Invited reviews offer a reliable, trustworthy peer review processes based on standards and focusing on patient safety. They support, but do not replace, existing procedures for managing performance.

The nature of the services offered vary depending on the Royal College or professional body. Summarising, Service Reviews can include advice and assurance on matters of service safety and quality, achieving service  improvement and best practice in service design or multi-site reconfiguration. Areas that an invited service review might focus on include:

• Reviewing concerns that have been raised about a service
• Examining issues underlying a pattern of serious untoward incidents or never events
• Analysing a service’s outcome data and advising on improvement
• Assessing services against national or local specialty standards and guidance
• Team working, leadership and workforce
• Helping plan for service configuration including working across networks and care pathways

Individual Reviews explore concerns about any aspect of an individual’s practice and provide advice on how any problems identified can be addressed. We work closely with NHS Resolution’s Practitioner Performance Advice Service. The scope of individual reviews can include:

• An individual’s volume and range of clinical activity
• Their standard of clinical decision making and providing or recommending treatment
• The quality of team working they have demonstrated in their clinical practice
• Their level of engagement with clinical governance systems.

Clinical Record Reviews provide an independent, expert opinion on the management of one or more episodes of patient care and whether this meets expected standards. These could include:

• Cases identified as potentially being of concern, either by staff or from patient complaints
• A strategic selection of cases, such as all of a service’s recent complications or deaths
• A group of randomly selected cases, offering an overall representation of an individual or a service’s scope of
  practice.

Each invited review is tailored to the specific requirements of the circumstances involved, for example a clinical record review element can be included as part an individual or service review. Terms of reference for a review will be agreed between the referring organisations and the College involved, to ensure that the scope of what is to be covered is clear and commonly understood.

For more information on services provided please contact the relevant College using the details below.