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.

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.

All human service sectors rely heavily on a common success factor: people. Care providers and consumers form a symbiotic relationship. They are two sides of the same coin. This webinar explores how this relationship can be designed to create a positive and upward spiral of improved staff satisfaction and care quality. 

Is clinical governance lagging behind corporate  governance, despite years of focus? This article argues that healthcare governance and management are still skewed towards corporate and administrative functions. 

In Australian health services, roles that support consumer safety are a mix of trained specialists, people who evolve on the job and those who struggle through the basics with little opportunity for development. In the UK,  the NHS has created a new role of ‘patient safety specialist’, introduced to bring a more structured, professional approach to patient safety. This evaluation article seeks to understand the professionalisation of patient safety, with implications for the further development of patient safety specialists in the UK and other countries. 

As finding and keeping the right staff continues to challenge human services’ ability to provide quality care, this case study explores a critical component of staff satisfaction and performance. Are the Right People in the Right Seats? delves into the process of aligning employee skills and roles for organisational success.  

People in quality and clinical governance roles are often viewed as a ‘spare pair of hands’ and end up doing tasks that they are not responsible for. This leads to dissatisfaction, burnout, and not getting the important jobs done. Mind Tools describes a four stage process for setting firmer boundaries that may be useful for those who want a more focused and effective role in 2024.

Ever wondered why some people seem to succeed more than others in the workplace (and life)?  

Stanford Psychology Professor Carol Dweck, has undertaken decades of research to understand what’s within our control when it comes to success and failure. While there are multiple contributors, Dweck suggests that mindset may be an even more powerful determinant of professional effectiveness and career success, than factors such as skills and experience. 

Improving care and services is an ongoing challenge, but what barriers to success do the most damage? The results of this systematic review of 33 qualitative studies identify key organisational characteristics of healthcare organisations that were struggling to improve care. These organisations were characterised by below-average patient outcomes (eg. mortality) or other quality of care metrics (eg. Patient Safety Indicators).

QI implementation is complex as it often spans over multiple organisational levels requiring active participation of employees and managers, and involves improvements and modifications of underlying care processes.