Resources

The critical role of nurses in clinical care and quality is well recognised. This integrative literature review used the Joanna Briggs Institute (2020) Critical Appraisal Tools to examine nurse empowerment. Findings show that empowered nurses are more likely to deliver quality care through better decision-making, greater autonomy, and a stronger professional identity. This, in turn, supports improved patient outcomes, higher job satisfaction, better adherence to safety protocols, and fewer medical errors.

Sustaining and scaling system improvement is an ongoing challenge in the complexity of human services. Efforts to address common care problems are constantly reinvented, as lessons learned in one organisation are not routinely transferred to others. This article describes an approach to long term spread and scale from the beginning of small-scale improvement. 

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.

This systematic review explores the relationship between management practices and care quality, and finds that hospitals with management systems focused on effective operations, monitoring, target-setting and supportive human resources consistently outperform their peers on clinical quality metrics. We might call this the ‘clinical governance and management system’ within which both boards and executives must play their role for success. The authors describe roles for boards and executives.

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.

This qualitative study aims to identify key aspects of CEO participation in quality and safety programs that characterise effective leadership for quality improvement (QI). 

Is there a recipe for creating a high-performing health service? Of course there is! We don’t have to look too far into the literature to find multiple sources of evidence on high performance. This study, from the 2015 ‘vault,’ is particularly useful as it identifies seven clear themes from a systematic review of the qualitative literature on high-performing hospitals.

Consumer-directed care, consumer-centred care, consumer-focused care - whatever terms are used in your sector - remains a work in progress across human services.  Some sectors have embraced and refined their approach to consumer decision-making and partnerships over many years; for others it remains a current challenge.  Aged care, in particular, demonstrates some unique barriers to partnering with consumers in their care, as highlighted by this systematic review which examined the evidence relating to consumer-directed care (CDC) in the aged care environment.  

In this webinar, Dr. Cathy Balding and her guest, Professor Alan Lilly, discuss Professor Alan's moment of realisation on the difference he could make leading improvement in clinical care.

The Victorian Safety Culture Guide (VSCG), from Safer Care Victoria, supports healthcare leaders to measure and monitor their organisation’s safety culture;  and is also a useful tool for other sectors to adapt and apply to develop their safety cultures.