Resources

Specific research into home care quality is in its infancy, relative to other care settings.  This comprehensive study explores differences in healthcare outcomes between urban and rural home care settings, with a focus on two key quality metrics: hospital admissions and emergency room (ER) visit rates.

Is clinical governance lagging behind corporate  governance, despite years of focus? This article argues that healthcare governance and management are still skewed towards corporate and administrative functions. 

‘Safety culture is like a garden: to bloom, it must be planned, planted and  tended.’ This is a key message from a systematic review of safety culture and an excellent reminder that culture is never ‘set and forget’.

Medication errors remain a stubbornly challenging issue in the provision of safe care. Although we often associate inpatient settings with medication issues, this comprehensive review studied the triumvirate of prescribing, dispensing and administration to determine common causal factors of mistakes and inaccuracies, leading to incidents in ambulatory and outpatient settings.

There are many benefits of enhancing consumer and staff satisfaction in human services, but something we don’t often discuss is the potential financial advantage. Creating a great experience for both consumers and staff can be viewed as a professional and ethical imperative; and also as a strategic business investment.

Outpatient safety receives a different level of discussion and focus than inpatient safety. We may not consider that outpatients can experience harm in the same way that inpatients can, which could reduce the focus on collecting accurate outpatient incident data. But even outpatient care can cause life-threatening harm, as this study shows.

Trying to improve care in human services can be overwhelming. We start out with great aspirations to fix a care quality issue. But as we get closer to the problem it appears to loom ever larger, and we wonder what we’ve got ourselves into. Most care quality issues are entrenched and multifaceted and can’t be solved by a single solution or big-bang change. Often our initial enthusiasm wanes and we default to revising the procedure and running training because everything else seems too hard. Essentially, we’ve wasted time and effort on maintaining the problem, rather than finding the solution.

Striking a balance between patient safety and professional autonomy is a complex issue that requires a multifaceted approach. Multiple challenges stand in the way of a balanced approach, such as...

How many aged care residents receive care based on the best available evidence? We all want this for the people we serve – but what’s really happening?

This ‘CareTrack’ paper reports on the first Australian study of adherence to evidence-based care for people in long-term care using a standardised method. The study examined the care received by 294 residents across 27,585 care encounters in 25 long-term care (aged care) facilities. 

Unwarranted variation in procedures and outcomes (a key component of appropriate care) is a major challenge in healthcare. Reducing unwarranted variation in care processes and outcomes can reduce wasteful, unnecessary or even harmful care. Increasing attention is being paid to the rich information on care appropriateness contained in clinical registry and clinical audit data, but it can be challenging to interpret this data for broader quality monitoring purposes.