Access a range of articles and resources written by clinical governance experts and search our carefully curated list of safety and quality journal articles and reports.
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As finding and keeping the right staff continues to challenge human services’ ability to provide quality care, this case study explores a critical component of staff satisfaction and performance. Are the Right People in the Right Seats? delves into the process of aligning employee skills and roles for organisational success.
Spreading, scaling up, and sustaining improvements in human services is a complex challenge that many countries, including the UK, USA, and Australia, have been tackling. Despite significant efforts, the sustainability of scaling up local improvements remains low. One reason for this is the traditional, linear approach to spreading improvements, which often overlooks the complexity and evolving nature of healthcare systems.
Healthcare has worked on reducing ‘Low-Value Care’ for several years now, with varying success. The significant negative impact of low-value care includes increased healthcare costs, patient harm, and resource wastage. These authors propose a framework to address the still pervasive issue of low-value care such as unnecessary tests, treatments, and procedures that offer little benefit to patients and may even cause harm.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) has introduced the concept of Quality Improvement (QI) ‘dosing’, where different staff roles receive tailored levels of improvement science (SOI) training based on their responsibilities.
This Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA) Tool, provided by the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI), is a comprehensive resource designed to help human services systematically identify and mitigate potential risks in clinical processes.
We spend a lot of time on root cause analysis (RCA) – and have done it for 20 years or so. But key clinical risks remain stubbornly consistent.
Implementation is often a weak link in improvement efforts to meet targets. Yet the success and sustainability of change depends on it. The Implementation Playbook is a quick reference guide developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) to facilitate effective health-related implementation efforts.
Clinical tools for use in practice—such as medicine reconciliation charts, diagnosis support tools and track-and-trigger charts—are popular in health and human services. However, they are given relatively little attention to how to optimise their design.
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.
This Perspectives Brief from the Australian Healthcare and Hospitals Association’s Deeble Institute examines approaches to observations of the Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety. The authors of this Perspectives Brief note that the Royal Commission ‘identified the need to improve the delivery of health care to meet the needs of older persons and their carers’ and that the ‘greater involvement of older persons and their carers in research to develop solutions was recommended.’
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