Resources

The Registry of Senior Australians (ROSA) have released its latest ROSA Outcome Monitoring System (OMS) report, a quality and safety monitoring and benchmarking system designed to promote quality improvement, transparency, and accountability for the aged care sector.

Across human services, organisations struggle with the right response to quality data. Too often we spend time and resources ‘fixing’ the right thing – or addressing the right thing but not fixing it.

In this webinar, Cathy Jones, Board Director and Clinical Governance Consultant discussed quality metrics and the following questions:

• How do you measure quality? 
• What’s the best way of measuring - safe? effective? person centred? connected? accessible?
• How do you find & organise all of your (387) quality metrics? 
• How to prioritise what is most important when everything is important?
• How to decide which metrics to monitor when there is so much data available - what criteria should you use to select the most important measures
• The power of measures that are relevant both at an organisation-wide level and at a unit/department level.

That depends on the answer to these questions.

James Reason once characterised the goal of error investigations as ‘draining the swamp, not swatting mosquitoes’. Critical incidents arise from the interplay between active failures (eg. not double-checking for allergies before administering a medication) and latent conditions (eg. workload).

Many hospitals continue to use incident reporting systems (IRSs) as their primary patient safety data source. The information IRSs collect on the frequency of harm to patients [adverse events (AEs)] is generally of poor quality, and some incident types (e.g. diagnostic errors) are under-reported. Other methods of collecting patient safety information using medical record review, such as the Global Trigger Tool (GTT), have been developed. The aim of this study was to undertake a systematic review to empirically quantify the gap between the percentage of AEs detected using the GTT to those that are also detected via IRSs.

This guide has a practical emphasis and focuses on how measurement tools can assist Boards to set the right tone of assurance in patient safety. It also offers governance questions to assist Board debate and dialogue. 

This workshop discusses how to use clinical (or quality) governance as an effective tool for leading and governing for a high-performing organisation.

Quality improvement is integral to providing safe care for consumers.

These resources provide help with planning ahead for your next audit, understanding where you are now, and conducting improvement initiatives that make a real, lasting difference in your organisation.