Healthcare Improvement Plan

We aim to increase the percentage of patients receiving care within the appropriate timeframe according to whether they have been assessed as urgent or routine.

This is crucial for the effective management of eating disorders, as delays in treatment can lead to worsening symptoms and complications. Early and appropriate treatment can reduce hospital admissions, prevent escalation to more intensive care, and improve long-term outcomes. It supports patients to receive help before their illness becomes more severe.

We aim to increase the percentage of patients being offered and taking-up NICE concordant treatment.

Offering and ensuring the take-up of NICE concordant interventions means that patients are receiving treatments that are proven to be effective, safe, and aligned with the best available evidence.

Improving the consistency and uptake of NICE-recommended treatment across services will reduce variation in care and help more patients achieve positive outcomes, including better physical health, reduced symptoms, and improved quality of life.

We aim to improve the recording of patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs) and clinician-reported outcome measures (CROMs) related to physical and mental health. This helps assess the effectiveness of treatment over time and track patient progress.

Recording outcomes consistently will not only help provide the most appropriate and effective care but also enable services to see whether their outcomes are comparable to other similar services.

We aim to reduce inequalities in eating disorders care, by achieving parity of esteem across Children and Young People (CYP) and adult services, geographical location, and eating disorder diagnoses.

At present, disparities exist in the availability and quality of care between children’s and adult services, across geographical regions, and different eating disorder diagnoses.

This plan commits to addressing these variations so that all patients, wherever they live and whatever their diagnosis, can access high-quality care. We will also monitor inequalities across protected characteristics to ensure services are fair and inclusive.

Improvement requires coordinated action at national, regional, and local levels:

• Nationally, we will develop and disseminate best practice recommendations through reports and collaborate with NHSE to develop guidelines.
• Regionally, we will work with leads to establish improvement collaborative through our quality improvement (QI) network and facilitate regional data sharing and benchmarking.
• Locally, services will be supported to undertake quality improvement projects informed by audit data. See our Quality Improvement page to learn more about the NAED QI network.

We will deliver high quality performance measures reported in a timely manner to facilitate and drive quality improvement. Reporting outputs designed to support eating disorder services will include:

• A service mapping report detailing the breadth and depth of service provision in England
• Quarterly reports of performance against the audit metrics on an interactive online data platform
• A 'state of the nation' report in 2027 which will provide key findings and recommendations for improving care.

Services participating in the audit will be invited to join the NAED Quality Improvement (QI) Network. Led by QI expert Maureen McGeorge and QI Coach Sadhbh Fitzgerald, the network provides support through training workshops, webinars, and shared learning sessions, to guide improvement efforts using audit data.

QI resources will be available on the interactive data dashboard and will help address topics that teams aim to improve based on the audit data using QI techniques.

Lived experience is at the heart of this improvement strategy. Two lived experience advisors play a key role in both our advisory groups. They also sit on the Implementation Group to provide decision-making input to the audit, alongside our clinical advisors.

We also consult a group of 10 Experts-by-Experience as well as our Service User and Carer Advisors to provide input on audit design, implementation, and dissemination of findings.

By embedding patient and public involvement at every stage, we aim to ensure that the audit reflects the realities of care and the priorities of those most affected.