Resources

In this webinar, Prof Steve Nicholls discussed the challenges and opportunities faced in opening Australia’s first dedicated Heart Hospital, integrating clinical cardiology services, research and education to create a centre of excellence.

Start with your clinical governance framework. Dr Sue Sinni, RN, RM shared her insights and useful tools in preparing for and assessing short-notice accreditation. 

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.

Many hospitals continue to use incident reporting systems (IRSs) as their primary patient safety data source. The information IRSs collect on the frequency of harm to patients [adverse events (AEs)] is generally of poor quality, and some incident types (e.g. diagnostic errors) are under-reported. Other methods of collecting patient safety information using medical record review, such as the Global Trigger Tool (GTT), have been developed. The aim of this study was to undertake a systematic review to empirically quantify the gap between the percentage of AEs detected using the GTT to those that are also detected via IRSs.

Too often, seemingly simple improvement interventions are implemented without fully considering how the intervention might achieve the desired results, whether it can cause harm, or whether a different intervention should be considered. The tendency to favour rapid solutions and implementation over longer-term analysis and measurement represents a common pitfall in quality and safety studies.

Health and social care standards have been widely adopted as a quality improvement intervention. Standards are typically made up of evidence-based statements that describe high-quality care as an outcome or process of care delivery. They involve stakeholders at multiple levels and multiple activities across diverse services. It’s not difficult to see why many problems challenge effective implementation. Getting people on board is hard. Staff see standards as ‘extra work’. Quality managers and clinicians may be at odds, both with different agendas. Line managers may see accreditation as the quality manager’s job, rather than as part of their responsibility for meeting standards of care. Everyone may be doing their best, but there are many barriers to success.

Three short videos from Dr Cathy Balding about how to be a more effective quality improvement professional.

In this webinar, Dr Katharine See shared her insights from her experience with implementing a digital care pathway for patients with lung cancer. She discussed the importance of collecting outcomes for impact, co-designing digital pathways with clinicians and consumers and lessons learned. 

Learn how Quality Improvement and Clinical Governance go hand-in-hand to improve the quality of care provided by healthcare leaders. 

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.