Resources

This IHI blog reinforces the importance of SPC charts and provides links to tools and guides for their use. 

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.

Variation in healthcare quality is an ongoing issue. This study seeks to understand how differences in hospital practices and policies can lead to disparities in consumer outcomes and overall care quality. The authors compared process and outcome measures to detect variation and characteristics of hospitals with lower variation.

Clinical Guidelines are developed to standardise practice and provide a solid evidence base for care. They are essential components of clinical governance to support safe and effective care and serve as valuable tools for training.  

As this study reveals, guidelines can also be a source of confusion and misapplication. Ambiguities in guidelines can result in varying interpretations among healthcare providers, contributing to inconsistent care and potential patient harm. 

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.

As part of their work to reduce healthcare variation, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare provides a range of case studies that demonstrate how unwarranted clinical variation can be successfully addressed.

Regular reviews of clinical variation data help health services identify areas of practice that need improvement. They are also mandated by Action 1.28 of the National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards. This Guide presents a six-step approach to the review of clinical variation data, and case studies that put those steps into action.

All health services need to meet Action 1.28 Variation in clinical practice and health outcomes in the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards (second edition).

Clinical pathways are standardised, evidence-based multidisciplinary management plans, which identify an appropriate sequence of clinical interventions, timeframes, milestones and expected outcomes for a homogenous patient group.

Care bundle concepts to improve critical care processes to the highest levels of reliability and result in vastly improved outcomes.