Resources

As a hospital CEO, Bernadette McDonald did a lot of listening. But when her organisation decided to create a ‘patient expectations’ document, she realised she didn’t always ‘hear’. This lightbulb revelation led to significant change.

Leadership and culture are pillars of any clinical governance framework and often cited as the key framework components.   But Dr. Kedar Mate and Josh Clark from IHI challenge us to understand the role that systems play in good care.  They argue that many improvement initiatives fail due to systemic issues rather than a lack of vision or communication from leaders, and advocate for a focus on ‘operating systems’ that support good care.

We know the critical role that healthcare governing boards play in driving improvements in care quality and safety.  Cultivating board understanding and focus can be challenging, however.  We are still a long way from all boards having the same comfort with clinical governance as they do with corporate governance. This article suggests four key actions to support boards to enact their responsibilities for care quality.

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.

In this webinar, Sarah Fischer, Director of Culture & Capability at Safer Care Victoria discussed the elements that make up a safety culture; the steps to safety culture maturation, the signs that indicate success and how culture is influenced at a local level.

In his 1993 book, Managing at the Speed of Change, Daryl Connor wrote about the 1988 North Sea Piper Alpha oil rig fire – a fatal explosion of an oil drilling platform in which one survivor had to choose to jump into a sea of burning oil rather than burn on the platform. He coined the term “burning platform” as a metaphor to explain the necessity of change despite the fear of the unknown consequences. For healthcare, this metaphor aligns nicely to describe the introduction of short-notice assessments.

This list of questions, developed by Jim Reinertsen, MD, is designed to help think through the key decisions involved with forming a Board Quality Committee and formalizing the processes by which the committee will do its work.

Satisfied and engaged employees are more committed and connected to their roles, their teams and your business. Keeping these productive and engaged staff is especially important in a competitive and challenging recruiting environment.

This guide has a practical emphasis and focuses on how measurement tools can assist Boards to set the right tone of assurance in patient safety. It also offers governance questions to assist Board debate and dialogue.

This paper presents evidence of a comprehensive range of processes related to governing healthcare quality undertaken at the corporate governance level.