Resources

Audits and quality improvement projects are vital aspects of clinical governance and continual service improvement in medicine.

What everyone should know about health care quality improvement. This guide focuses on quality improvement and is especially useful for healthcare staff leading fast and efficient service change as a result of the pandemic.

In this webinar, Bernie Harrison, Director, Improvement Academy explains the history of quality improvement (QI) and how to translate QI theories to clinical work. Participants will develop awareness of how to use QI methods to improve three classes of outcomes; cost, complications/adverse events and client experience/service measures.

Staff and consumer satisfaction are interdependent. But in human services, we often address them separately – or think that one comes at the expense of the other. But high-performance organisations think differently.

Access important websites relating to safety, quality and regulatory standards.

The AICG community can easily access important websites relative to safety, quality and regulatory healthcare standards. Browse our carefully curated list of websites below. 

Older adults report Quality of Life (QoL) as a central goal for aged care, with 93% of Australians agreeing that it should be mandatory for providers to publicly report on QoL measures. Quality of life is also considered by older Australians as a valuable indicator for comparing aged care services. But it’s still not routinely measured and reported in clinical governance datasets.

It has been reported that complaints relating to registered health practitioners increased over the 2021/2022 financial year. Further (and separately), in aged care, there was a total of 2,767 complaints made in the first quarter of 2022 and 2,642 complaints in the second quarter. Both these figures had also trended upwards compared with the corresponding numbers in 2021 (with 2,313 in the first quarter of 2021 and 2,261 in the second quarter).

Variations in the way care is accessed or delivered, and in clinical outcomes, can be highly informative. It may be that such variations are warranted or expected (for example, the surge in telehealth at the outset of the pandemic, or in the number of infection-related deaths) or may reflect person-centredness and individual choice. However sometimes variations may be ‘unwarranted’ and unveil weaknesses in the quality of care, or worse still, herald the risk of harm.

All human service sectors experience turning points. The 1990s was a decade of revelation about poor healthcare quality, identified and reported in major studies of adverse events and public inquiries across the world. The initial shock waves evolved into a care safety revolution, supported by the introduction of clinical governance. A quarter of a century later, the outcomes of the Aged Care Quality and Safety Royal Commission is having a similar impact in aged care, with a stream of legislation and innovations challenging aged care providers to re-set their approach to creating and maintaining quality care.

In this webinar, Cathy Balding will talk us through four clinical governance rabbit holes that have been observed in healthcare and how avoiding them can accelerate aged care clinical governance effectiveness.

Simulation in healthcare has traditionally been applied in the context of education and training. Whilst robust education and training (which may be achieved through simulation) will ultimately improve safety and quality, simulation can also be used much more broadly - and directly - as a tool in enhancing safety and quality in care delivery.