It is essential that hospitals know when they are performing well and when there is improvement needed.
At St Andrew’s we pride ourselves on knowing what is happening across the organisation and we have been recognised by the ACHS with an award for Excellence in Healthcare Measurement.
Some of the methods we use to gather information about the safety and quality of clinical care and performance at St Andrew’s include:
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Adverse event monitoring – this is the monitoring of unintended injury or complication that results in disability, death or prolonged hospital stay, and is caused by health care management rather than the patient’s disease.
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Incident monitoring – this is the system of voluntary reporting by our staff of errors or near misses.
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Hazard monitoring – this is the system of voluntary reporting by our staff of situations which may lead to an incident or “near miss”.
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Clinical indicator monitoring – this collection & analysis of data provides us with the ability to alert our clinicians to possible problems or opportunities for improvement in patient care.
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Clinical audits/reviews – we audit a range of areas through systematic review of care against explicit criteria and the implementation of change. This quality improvement process provides us with the data to review and improve patient care and outcomes.
- Performance Indicator monitoring – this is the same as for clinical indicator monitoring but measures our non-clinical performance. We measure a range of non-clinical performance, including our human resource and environmental performance. In total, St Andrew’s measures more than 500 clinical and performance indicators. This enables us to track our improvements and successes.
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Benchmarking – this is a structured process for comparing the organisation’s work practices to the best similar practices you can identify in other organisations and then incorporating these best ideas into your own processes. St Andrew’s benchmarks our clinical indicators through the Australian Council of Healthcare Standards (ACHS) and non-clinical performance indicators are also benchmarked against industry leaders.
- Performance Improvement Projects (PIPs) – we use our PIPs as an opportunity for staff to identify areas for improvement and be involved in planning, doing and evaluating the outcomes.