Access a range of articles and resources written by clinical governance experts and search our carefully curated list of safety and quality journal articles and reports.
AICG articles, resources and curated journals and reports are available to all AICG members. Members must be logged in, in order to access all content. Users who are not AICG members will only be able to access publicly available articles.
Clinical tools for use in practice—such as medicine reconciliation charts, diagnosis support tools and track-and-trigger charts—are popular in health and human services. However, they are given relatively little attention to how to optimise their design.
Trying to improve care in human services can be overwhelming. We start out with great aspirations to fix a care quality issue. But as we get closer to the problem it appears to loom ever larger, and we wonder what we’ve got ourselves into. Most care quality issues are entrenched and multifaceted and can’t be solved by a single solution or big-bang change. Often our initial enthusiasm wanes and we default to revising the procedure and running training because everything else seems too hard. Essentially, we’ve wasted time and effort on maintaining the problem, rather than finding the solution.
This Perspectives Brief from the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association’s Deeble Institute examines approaches to observations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. The authors of this Perspectives Brief note that the Royal Commission ‘identified the need to improve the delivery of health care to meet the needs of older persons and their carers’ and that the ‘greater involvement of older persons and their carers in research to develop solutions was recommended.’
Care and service improvement requires the ability to make successful local change, then to transfer this for implementation in other departments and services, or across a whole organisation or sector. However, research shows that highly institutionalised and complex healthcare systems find the spread of transformation difficult, being naturally slow to adapt, innovate, and improve. Change therefore usually happens incrementally and inconsistently, with successful innovation resembling a journey rather than a single event. This is characterised by processes of adoption, implementation, sustaining, spreading, and scaling up.
This document provides a useful explanation of clinical quality registries (CQRs). Although targeted at consumers, it will also be helpful for providers seeking clarity on the origin and use of CQRs in their clinical improvement program.
The East London NHS Foundation Trust (ELFT) has dived deeply into partnering with consumers for service improvement. ELFT provides mental health and community services to a diverse population in over 100 community and inpatient sites.
There are many documented benefits of accreditation. These include driving the establishment of organisational structures and processes, promotion of a quality and safety culture, and improvement in care. Organisational benefits in terms of effectiveness, efficiency, and integration of health services, innovation, support for evidence-based decision-making, and increased stakeholder engagement, have also been discussed in the literature.
Do you need some ideas for the next time you're facilitating a workshop or team event?
Managing change remains the most important challenge that leaders grapple with today. By our nature, we resist change and lean towards sustaining the status quo.
Change is scary — and challenging. Maintaining an existing habit is easier than changing it and trying something new means there is a possibility of failure. Most people prefer to stay in their comfort zone than venture into unknown territory however change is where we grow and improve our organisations. So if change is inevitable, how do we deal with it when it happens?
