‘Everyone has a key role to play in delivering safe services for patients.’

Welcome to the 2018 Viapath Quality Account. It demonstrates our open and transparent approach to patient safety and quality and how we discharge our statutory obligations for delivering services to NHS funded patients.

Viapath’s pathology services support every patient pathway across our healthcare community every day of the year for:

• A cancer diagnosis
• A serious infection
• Patients with multiple organ failure in the intensive care unit
• A GP health-check
• An A&E visit

Monitoring of long-term conditions

Patients and clinicians need certainty of a safe, quality service on-time, every-time. This is monitored by Viapath and our customers separately and together through:

• Performance indicators in the laboratories and across the whole pathway
• Feedback from customers with compliments or complaints
• Auditing of policies and practice
• Reporting of incidents and the review of risks

How we do this is described in our Quality Account.

This year, our Quality Account puts the spotlight on the important work which our customer services and Service Improvement Team undertake and how our teams are making a difference for patients and customers.

You can read more by accessing the Viapath 2018 Quality Account;

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Improving Patients’ Lives

Viapath proudly presents its 2015 Quality Account which gives an insight into how Viapath delivers high quality services.

"Quality is not just about today, but how we adapt to new scientific advances for the benefits of tomorrow’s patients"
Professor Jonathan Edgeworth, Medical Director, Viapath

This is now the second year we have shared our Quality Account publicly as a demonstration of our commitment to quality and transparency. The national context to the publication of this Quality Account is the reaffirmation of the need to put patient quality at the centre of all NHS services in the light of the publication of the report of the Public Inquiry into the Mid Staffordshire NHS Foundation Trust chaired by Robert Francis QC. This was followed by the report of the Pathology Quality Assurance Review chaired by Dr Ian Barnes after an incident at Sherwood Forest Hospitals where problems with Pathology quality assurance negatively impacted on a number of cancer patients. Viapath shares Dr Barnes’ commitment to a ‘relentless focus on improvement, which champions the patient as a user and operates in a reflective and open manner, so that it can improve not only its own performance, but share its learning to benefit the rest of the NHS.’