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Clinical governance might be considered as being about “how we control, regulate direct or oversee the assessment and management of a person’s health to support optimal outcomes”, where outcomes encompass the person’s “experience of care”.  In the context of palliation, while we cannot alter the outcome, we can certainly aim to enhance a person’s end-of-life experience.

Clinical governance has an important role in primary care, but primary care also has an important role in clinical governance.

How are clinical information systems relevant to clinical governance? The answer is quite straightforward: imagine a world of care delivery in darkness (literally or metaphorically), absent of any information about the person for whom you are providing care.

The term ‘clinical governance’ was first coined in the context of the National Health Service (NHS) in the United Kingdom, being ‘a system through which NHS organisations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish.'

We are all responsible for clinical governance - whether as health practitioners at the point of care, managers, or decision-makers on the Board. While we usually refer to clinical governance in terms of organisational frameworks, systems and processes, clinical governance is also an individual responsibility.

Certainly, governing bodies are responsible for robust clinical governance - however, individuals within the organisation are equally accountable and responsible for ensuring that clinical governance operates in practice. A failure to do so may amount to professional misconduct.

In this webinar recording, A/Prof Debora Picone, CEO at Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare, paints a holistic picture of clinical governance across all sectors and explains why Standard 1 is so important. She discusses the cross-sector health and care workforce in the context of clinical governance, highlights the learnings of the review of Standard 1 and provides her key takeaways for health and care workers to pursue safe and quality care.

Clinical governance (the concept of which emerged in the 1990s in the context of health care) has traditionally attracted less attention in the care of people living with a disability, with a noticeable dearth of research specific to this sector. Such oversight has been highlighted in the recent draft report by the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (Disability Royal Commission), which inquired into the Federal Government's approach to the rollout of COVID-19 vaccines to disability care residents and workers.

Primary and community care are fundamental to population health. They support the community’s physical and mental well-being through their role in health promotion, health literacy and preventative care, as well as in the early intervention and ongoing management of acute and chronic conditions, including end-of-life care

It’s almost impossible to think about clinical governance these days without also thinking about digital health. But what does clinical governance mean in this digitised age?

Clinical governance has attracted fresh limelight in recent times in the context of a pandemic, intense public scrutiny of our aged care and disability systems, and concomitant acceleration of digital health.