Resources

No matter where or when you provide care, clinical governance is an essential concept to grasp and implement. For more than a decade, care professionals in the Pacific have been developing and strengthening their clinical governance frameworks and knowledge. This has involved close collaboration with Australian institutes and colleges. In this webinar, Drs Silina Motofaga (Pacific Community, SPC) and Alipate Vakamocea (Fiji Program Support Platform, FPSP) share the journey Pacific Island Countries and Territories have taken towards improving and implementing good clinical governance practices. They cover engaging clinicians and key administrators on the pathway to success. If you are trying to change hearts and minds towards better clinical governance – no matter where or what country you are in – this webinar is for you.

As a specialist physician and healthcare leader, Professor Murphy has long recognised the problem of providing futile treatment. In this Lightbulb session, he recalled his realisation as a clinician that this was a serious, but not often-discussed, issue, and relate how this has influenced his significant contribution to healthcare.

In this webinar, Nicole and Megha described the important links between clinical governance and good clinical care outcomes. They showed how clinical governance is embedded within the strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards. Using scenarios, they present how aged care providers can meet their clinical governance responsibilities.
 

AICG was delighted to take part in a Women on Boards (WoB) Chat. Our Senior Manager of Education and Business Development, Dr Richard Huysmans, presented an overview of AICG’s clinical governance training — tailored for current and aspiring board members and executives.

When Paul ran a session with a senior medical group on accreditation, he was all ready to go through the standards; but then decided to take a different approach.  What he learned made a difference to that accreditation assessment and has stood him in good stead ever since. 

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.

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.

Unleashing the Potential of our Health Workforce, led by Professor Mark Cormack, looked at the available evidence about health professionals’ ability to deliver on their full scope of practice in primary care. The review identified opportunities to remove the barriers stopping health professionals from working to their full scope of practice. It also drew on examples of multi-disciplinary teams where members are working to their full scope of practice to deliver best-practice primary care. Here, Mark presented some barriers and opportunities for health professionals to work at their full scope of practice.

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.