As we keep saying, ‘quality’ is about way more than accreditation. But is it also about accounting? Get the quality right and the dollars will follow, so they say. Or will they?
1. QUALITY QUANDARY
Our QQ for today reminds us that sometimes it ‘pays’ to show management that quality improvement is handy for more than passing accreditation.
Mate KS, Rakover J, Cordiner K, Noble A, Hassan N. Novel quality improvement method to reduce cost while improving the quality of patient care: Retrospective observational study. BMJ Quality and Safety. 2020;29(7):586-594. [Epub ahead of print January 23, 2020]
https://qualitysafety.bmj.com/content/29/7/586
2. THE POINT
Two articles this episode:
11:45 How do frontline staff use patient experience data for service improvement? Findings from an ethnographic case study evaluation Louise Locock et al. Journal of Health Services Research & Policy 2020, Vol. 25(3) 151–161.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1355819619888675
The good – and not so good – of frontline staff thinking on use of consumer experience data for improvement.
22:00 On selecting quality indicators: preferences of patients with breast and colon cancers regarding hospital quality indicators, Salampessy et al (2019), BMJ Quality & Safety, Jul; 29 (7): 576-585. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31831636/
3. TLDR
Seven excellent tips for sustaining teamwork under a load of stress – and beyond.
27:05 Tannenbaum, s. et al. Managing teamwork in the face of pandemic: evidence-based tips. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2020-011447
OTHER COVID-related RESOURCES
ACSQHC https://www.safetyandquality.gov.au/covid-19
The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has developed a number of resources to assist healthcare organisations, facilities and clinicians.
| National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce https://covid19evidence.net.au/ The National COVID-19 Clinical Evidence Taskforce is a collaboration of peak health professional bodies across Australia whose members are providing clinical care to people with COVID-19. The taskforce is undertaking continuous evidence surveillance to identify and rapidly synthesise emerging research in order to provide national, evidence-based guidelines and clinical flowcharts for the clinical care of people with COVID-19. The guidelines address questions that are specific to managing COVID-19 and cover the full disease course across mild, moderate, severe and critical illness. These are ‘living’ guidelines, updated with new research in near real-time in order to give reliable, up-to-the minute advice to clinicians providing frontline care in this unprecedented global health crisis. Back to top |
| COVID-19 Critical Intelligence Unit https://www.aci.health.nsw.gov.au/covid-19/critical-intelligence-unit The Agency for Clinical Innovation (ACI) in New South Wales has developed this page summarising rapid, evidence-based advice during the COVID-19 pandemic. Its operations focus on systems intelligence, clinical intelligence and evidence integration. The content includes a daily evidence digest and evidence checks on a discrete topic or question relating to the current COVID-19 pandemic. |
4. DRDR
41:00 This Did Read Do Read tells a great story of how a health service spotted clinical registries for the gold mine of data they are, and integrated them into their organisation’s quality reporting.
Ahern, s et al. Maximising the value of clinical registry information through integration with a health service clinical governance framework: a case study. Australian Health Review 44(3) 421-426 https://doi.org/10.1071/AH19004
5. QUALITY HACK
50:00 Jones beats the email drum – again. And a useful frame to guide emerging from a crisis.
https://hbr.org/2020/05/if-you-feel-like-youre-regressing-youre-not-alone?ab=hero-subleft-3
6. OTHER BITS:
- New online course from Balding: ‘The Quality System Roadmap.’ This is my step by step map to creating a quality system that creates great care. More info and Access here:
https://qualityclass.kartra.com/page/QSRsignup
- CPD hours – would you like to earn 1 CPD hour for every time you listen to our podcast? If so, let Jones know we can investigate producing a product for this: cathyjoneshealth@gmail.com
- Talk to Us:
- Leave a question on our website: www.noharmdonepodcast.com
- Twitter handles : @qualcat @CathyBalding
- Link In with us on LinkedIn.
Hi Cathies,
Still loving your work and thanks for the shout out earlier in the year. I have a question unrelated to this topic that I hope you can help me with.
I have developed and manage a Mortality and Morbidity program for my health service (it is part of a sub regional program so not entirely my work at all I just got it happening as per the criteria set out). We review a lot of urgent care records and as a result of the reviews we regularly uncover near miss scenarios, inappropriate transfers, absence of critical communications, the administration of potentially dangerous drugs in the clinical situation etc. We don’t record these as near misses on our incident register and I am wondering whether we should, clearly they haven’t been noticed or reported by staff but picked up afterward – does this matter?
Personally I think they should be recorded as near misses but am so very reluctant to complete the painful data entry process (VHIMS) that I have sought opinion to which no one has an answer.
any thoughts?
best regards
fiona
Hi Fiona, I’m giving you full encouragement not to enter them in VHIMS – as long as the M&M process picks up important issues to improve, then you’re already addressing near misses & incidental incidents that way. Plus, it’s not just the M&M records that have missed incidents. ALL medical records have missed incidents. So don’t feel too bad about these ones being un-reported when there’s a minefield of unreported incidents out there. (This won’t make you feel better I’m guessing.) So if you want to do a more comprehensive project on this topic, you should look at a random sample of records to find the misses (not just M&M records), and then find a way of encouraging staff to report these types. The main point of doing any incident reporting is if trends are analysed out of VHIMS to prevent future incidents. But it feels like VHIMS data entry is too onerous to realistically ever achieve increased reporting. (Personal opinion there, I’m sure SCV/VAHI would disagree.)
Good luck!
CJ