Resources

In healthcare, keeping the people who are receiving care safe is not the responsibility of just one person, team, or department. It’s also not just the responsibility of those delivering the care—it falls on all of us. Whether you’re in leadership, at the point-of-care, or supporting the care process behind the scenes, you have a role to play in ensuring that the people being cared for in your organisation are safe.

Clinical deterioration is a key risk for any organisation providing clinical care. This qualitative study investigates how three organisational influences - leadership, culture and hierarchies -  impact healthcare professionals' readiness to raise concerns about patient deterioration. 

Over the past three decades, many health systems have sought to enhance care delivery. Despite various approaches such as quality improvement and lean management these efforts can fall short. Failures are often attributed to leaders and workers not doing the right things. This article argues that the real quality problems lie in the underlying systems staff work with. It says that human service organisations will be more successful if they focus on designing systems that support the delivery of high-quality care, rather than trying to fix the people working within them.

‘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’.

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.

In this webinar, Sarah Fischer, Director of Culture & Capability at Safer Care Victoria discussed the elements that make up a safety culture; the steps to safety culture maturation, the signs that indicate success and how culture is influenced at a local level.

In his 1993 book, Managing at the Speed of Change, Daryl Connor wrote about the 1988 North Sea Piper Alpha oil rig fire – a fatal explosion of an oil drilling platform in which one survivor had to choose to jump into a sea of burning oil rather than burn on the platform. He coined the term “burning platform” as a metaphor to explain the necessity of change despite the fear of the unknown consequences. For healthcare, this metaphor aligns nicely to describe the introduction of short-notice assessments.

Here is a list of resources to help managers and senior leaders help their teams become accreditation-ready every day.

Clinical leadership has long been an aspiration for acute care services. When wielded effectively, it is a key lever in creating consistently high quality care, and can also contribute to greater job satisfaction. But clinical leadership can also be just another buzz term, not dissimilar to ‘person-centred,’ as something everyone likes to think they both understand and enact. As with ‘person-centred’ care, clinical leadership is easy to talk about, powerful when effective, but hard to get right in practice.

Western Health is growing at a rapid rate; the organisation has doubled in size in the last five years and is likely to double again within the next six. This growth is the result of adding new services, such as becoming a designated mental health service by July 2023 and amalgamating with other smaller services, such as Djerriwarrh Health.

Like any organisation undergoing rapid growth, Western Health is focused on the scalability of the organisation, particularly when it comes to clinical governance.