Resources

The Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) have released its latest ROSA Outcome Monitoring System (OMS) report, a quality and safety monitoring and benchmarking system designed to promote quality improvement, transparency, and accountability for the aged care sector.

Over the past three decades, many health systems have sought to enhance care delivery. Despite various approaches such as quality improvement and lean management these efforts can fall short. Failures are often attributed to leaders and workers not doing the right things. This article argues that the real quality problems lie in the underlying systems staff work with. It says that human service organisations will be more successful if they focus on designing systems that support the delivery of high-quality care, rather than trying to fix the people working within them.

This systematic review aims to evaluate the impact of accreditation on quality improvement in healthcare services and to understand the contextual factors influencing its implementation.

Spreading, scaling up, and sustaining improvements in human services is a complex challenge that many countries, including the UK, USA, and Australia, have been tackling. Despite significant efforts, the sustainability of scaling up local improvements remains low. One reason for this is the traditional, linear approach to spreading improvements, which often overlooks the complexity and evolving nature of healthcare systems.

Healthcare has worked on reducing ‘Low-Value Care’ for several years now, with varying success. The significant negative impact of low-value care includes increased healthcare costs, patient harm, and resource wastage. These authors propose a framework to address the still pervasive issue of low-value care such as unnecessary tests, treatments, and procedures that offer little benefit to patients and may even cause harm.

What is the role of benchmarking data in good clinical governance? In this webinar, Health Roundtable discussed the role of risk-adjusted benchmarking and how it works, examples of where data has been used to improve clinical governance, how to make data accessible to clinicians and evidence to make the case for improvement.

In this Lightbulb Moment webinar, Dr Cathy Balding and her guest, Alex Cockram, discuss Alex's "ah-ha!" moment about the one word that transformed consumer focus.

‘Safety culture is like a garden: to bloom, it must be planned, planted and  tended.’ This is a key message from a systematic review of safety culture and an excellent reminder that culture is never ‘set and forget’.

Medication errors remain a stubbornly challenging issue in the provision of safe care. Although we often associate inpatient settings with medication issues, this comprehensive review studied the triumvirate of prescribing, dispensing and administration to determine common causal factors of mistakes and inaccuracies, leading to incidents in ambulatory and outpatient settings.

Correct identification of patients has been recognised as a critical safety issue for many years. A recent report from the UK’s Health Services Safety Investigation Body (HSSIB), compiles evidence from various investigations and sources to explore the factors contributing to patient misidentification in healthcare. The report defines 'positive patient identification' as the accurate identification of a patient to ensure they receive the correct care. Whereas, 'patient misidentification' occurs when a patient is wrongly identified as someone else, leading to potential harm from incorrect or missed treatment.