General Quality Management

Raising the standards of healthcare

At Medbelle, our patient’s well-being, alongside providing excellent levels of patient safety and quality of care is of the highest priority to us. It is for these reasons we have developed various key performance indicators to ensure our quality framework is met for all our medical procedures.

We choose our surgeons carefully.

In order to maintain the best standards of care and patient safety, all consultants wishing to work with Medbelle must be GMC registered, achieved the highest possible qualification in their respective field, and be members of relevant medical societies (e.g. BAAPS, BAPRAS, BOA). In addition, each of our surgeons must apply for practice privileges at our partner hospitals. Approval to practice at a hospital is only granted if a surgeon satisfies a comprehensive set of criteria set by the hospital’s Medical Advisory Committee.

We choose our hospitals carefully

Any hospital we partner with that is rated by the Care Quality Commission CQC must score “Good” or higher on their reports.

We listen to our patients

We understand to provide the best patient experience we must listen to our patients. Therefore, we gather patient feedback in several different ways to make sure we capture every possible potential to improve our service further.

One example of how we use patient feedback to improve our service: We gather post-consultation feedback after the patient has had their consultation with one of our surgeons as the initial consultation is one of the most important parts of the patient journey. We then take the feedback we receive from our patients to make positive comparisons between our surgeons, paying particular attention to differences in approaches, styles, techniques, topics covered, support material provided and bedside manner. This helps us match our patients with the surgeon with whom they can build a good relationship. On this basis, we provide proactive feedback to all our surgeons based on our insights to ensure the best possible consultation.

Learn more about how we collect outcome measures and feedback and utilise this to improve patient satisfaction and quality of care.

Outcome measures and PROMs

Outcomes measurements

Measuring outcomes is highly important in the medical industry and a measure of overall quality; there are many aspects to a patient’s journey and many factors behind the scenes that impact the quality of a patient’s experience, surgery, aftercare, and more. In recent years, research and medical institutions focused on new measures to properly assess the quality of clinical practices, all of which are centred around the improvement in the quality of life of patients. At Medbelle, we utilise the proven outcome measurement called PROMs.

What are PROMs?

PROMs (Patient-reported outcome measures) are the most prominent method to measure health-related quality of life and patient satisfaction for a medical service. It quantifies the change in a patient’s quality of life following medical intervention by using carefully formulated patient questionnaires. It is a method endorsed and used by the NHS, the Royal College of Surgeons (RCS) and many other health governing bodies such as NICE (National Institute of Clinical Excellence).

PROMs empower patients to ensure they receive a high quality of care, and it helps providers to improve their service. The RCS state that PROMs have many benefits:

Greater public transparency and accountability.
Enable surgeons a better basis for judging and improving their practice.
Offer patients the basis to make informed choices about their care.
Evidence for service improvement and quality assurance of operations.

Medical experts in their fields have compiled a list of treatment-specific and generalised questions to be answered before and after a medical intervention. The general questions relate to a patient’s well being and mental health, and treatment-specific questions differ from treatment to treatment and focus more on mobility, ability to perform daily activities, pain, and perception of their own body. These questionnaires cannot be tampered with or altered to ensure fairness across different medical providers.

How are PROMs at Medbelle collected?

Questionnaires set into different categories are electronically sent to patients before surgery and six months after. Patients score and answer the questions using their own perception without any outside influence from ourselves or our surgeons. Scoring the quality of service is conducted by measuring the change in score following surgery. An increase represents an improvement in the quality of life for the patient.

For example, a question in BREAST-Q for a patient undergoing a breast reduction: With your breasts in mind, in the past week, how confident have you felt in social settings?

None of the time (1)
A little of the time (2)
Some of the time (3)
Most of the time (4)
All of the time (5)

A patient stating ‘a little of the time before surgery’ and then stating ‘most of the time following surgery’ would have a PROM score of + 2 in the category psychosocial wellbeing. Other categories in BREAST-Q include physical well-being, sexual well-being, satisfaction with breasts, the experience of care, and satisfaction with the outcome. Each category has its own unique list of questions.

PROMs in orthopaedic surgery

In the NHS, the usage of PROMs in orthopaedic surgery is mandatory and is considered the benchmark to evaluate a service, such as surgery. Conversely to being highly established in the NHS, in the private sector, implementation of PROMs is voluntary and private providers of orthopaedic surgery have not embraced its usage. Implementation of PROMs and the transparency of their use in the private sector must be broader and more accessible.

At Medbelle, we advocate PROMs and encourage their usage across the industry. With our substantive network, all of our surgeons now use PROMs, and the outcomes of surgery are openly transparent to our patients.

To help patients compare services, we chose widely adopted and tested PROMs tools, EQ-5D, EQ-VAS, and the Oxford Hip and Knee scores. These tools have been heavily adopted by the NHS. They focus on five areas, mobility, self-care, usual activities, pain/discomfort and anxiety/depression. In orthopaedic PROMs, the focus is the patient’s own perceived improvement in their quality of life,

PROMs in cosmetic surgery

In cosmetic surgery, the usage of PROMs has not been widely adopted or, in most cases, has not been implemented at all. We feel this should not be the accepted standard. Patients receiving cosmetic surgery should expect their quality of care and improvement to be held to the same standards as all other medical procedures.

In July 2021, we launched PROMs for cosmetic procedures, setting what we hope will become an industry standard for cosmetic surgery.

To ensure the quality and rigour for implementing PROMs in cosmetic surgery, we use the Royal College of Surgeons endorsed tool from the University of British Columbia. They have curated PROM questionnaires across all the disciplines of cosmetic surgery. At Medbelle, we have chosen to use BREAST-Q, BODY-Q, and FACE-Q. Each tool comprises of independently functioning scales that measure three overarching constructs, appearance, quality of life and experience of care.

All PROMs outcomes will be made transparent to our patients.

Complications, Revisions and Patient Feedback

We are committed to listening and learning from every one of our patients

We pride ourselves on providing ever better high-quality care to all our patients. Since 2016, we have been able to improve the quality of life and overall satisfaction for thousands of patients through our elective medical procedures and care processes; many of our patients leave their thoughts about us on Trustpilot.

It is essential to us that everyone is fully supported throughout their surgery journey and to further improve our services wherever possible.

How we support, listen and learn from our patients.

Our Patient Experience Manager alongside our Patient Care Team Leads and Head of Care guide our patients who have let us know their concerns with their journey through our Patient Feedback and Complaints Pathway whilst providing them with empathetic and caring support. We also coordinate with surgeons and hospitals to ensure the best possible outcomes for all parties. As a patient, please be assured that we are always on hand to help you every step of the way.
We proactively support our patients in case of a complication arising after surgery and manage all necessary follow-up steps to organise everything for them. Each case is reviewed by us to further improve our clinical excellence and our patient’s satisfaction with their results. Throughout the process, we can draw on the expertise of our experienced surgeons within our Medical Advisory Committee.

Our Medical Advisory Committee (MAC)

The Medbelle Medical Advisory Committee constitutes the most important institutionalised point of contact and information between Medbelle and its surgeons. Its purpose is to ensure that policies and procedures support the delivery of safe, effective and supportive clinical care as well as upholding the development of the overall clinical strategy of Medbelle.

Medbelle´s MAC meets regularly and includes surgeon representatives with a wide range of clinical experience. Offering guidance and advice on clinical practice, the MAC also reviews and manages complaints and patient dissatisfaction. The panel will investigate a complaint and ensure national standards are adhered to maintain the highest standards of clinical excellence. Among other things, it draws on the outcome data Medbelle captures and analyses to further facilitate ongoing learning and improvement.

Here is a link to a list of our MAC members:

Mr Vik Vijh MB BS, FRCS (Eng), FRCS (Ed), FRCS (Plast)

Mr Edmund O’Connor MBBS B.Sc (Hons) FHEA FRCS (Plast)

Professor Iain Whittaker BA (Hons), MA Cantab, MBBChir, MRCS, PhD, FRCS Plast.