Earlier this month, the Grattan Institute released the Report– ‘All complications should count: Using our data to make hospitals safer’. It discussed the fact that one in nine patients who enter an Australian hospital will experience a complication. The report’s intent was to exposes the flaws in Australian hospitals’ safety and quality monitoring regime, and recommend reforms that could result in an extra 368,000 patients leaving hospital each year free of complications 1
The report also argued that Australia should study the full range of patient outcomes, particularly the better-than-expected results, rather than only the rare catastrophes or more significant events. It goes on to encourage hospitals to study all available data to help understand patient outcomes and in turn, use that knowledge to improve the safety and quality of hospital services.
Each quarter, the Health Roundtable provides in its standard hospital reports, numerous data and information on both the hospital acquired complications its patients receive and performance benchmarks of peer hospitals. This collection of data affords each hospital an opportunity to reflect on the quality of service it is offering- both good and not so good, and to consider initial or further improvements that can be made – to reduce complications to the best rate achievable.
Assoc. Prof. Jeanne Huddleston of the Mayo Clinic who founded, and led for 12 years, the Mayo Clinic’s 100% Mortality Review System, makes the point that all hospitals can learn from not only every death and patient complication, but also from every successful patient outcome. HRT Client Relationship Managers are available at any time to help each hospital and its clinical staff to better understand the content of all HRT reports and to share innovations from other members that may help solve a local problem. As always, we encourage members to ‘Ask Us First’ to help explain your data.
(Jeanne Huddleston will be one of the guest presenters at this year’s CEO Collaborative & AGM, and the Clinical Director’s workshop. Jeanne will share the Mayo’s techniques of improving the quality of patient outcomes and in particular how to better understand the largest safety problem facing health care today: acts of omission, not commission).