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New bid to raise standards of care THE New Zealand health system is raising the bar to improve its performance in quality and safety."New Zealand compares well with wealthier countries from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) on a range of indicators, including patient safety, timeliness and efficiency," says Director-General of Health Stephen McKernan. "Sadly, there are instances where things go wrong and people are harmed or die. Each preventable death is one too many. While we can rationalise the statistics, we should never forget that we are talking about people and their families." Mr McKernan says for many years health systems around the world have been actively encouraging health care workers and health systems to record and notify these events. System improvements come from understanding how the outcome could be avoided and what could be done differently in future. "Where a serious event occurs, it is vital we learn from those events. We need to understand what went wrong and why so that we can work to prevent a similar situation happening again. At the same time, we have an ethical duty to talk openly about what happened." "New Zealand hospitals are busy places. Dedicated and hardworking doctors, nurses, midwives and other highly trained health workers care for thousands of people every day and the vast majority of people receive safe care. "We also know that the public rates highly their experience of the health system. It is the job of the Ministry of Health and district health boards to further build on that to enhance their trust and confidence in our hospital system," In New Zealand a Ministerially appointed Quality Improvement Committee was tasked with advising on where the sector should best place its emphasis to achieve quality and safety outcomes. One of the committee's key tasks is to improve national systems for reporting incidents and standardise the classification of incidents around the country. Its work also includes infection prevention, safe medication management, improving the patient journey and national mortality review systems. "The committee was set up in February last year and in August the Minister of Health approved $20 million towards five projects under the National Quality Improvement Programme. A considerable amount of work has already been done on the development of each of the projects. The Ministry is taking a leadership role internationally. It is working with the OECD to establish internationally recognised measurements for safety. "We are one of the cosignatories to the World Health Organization's initiative on patient safety and health care quality launched in 2007. As well as learning from our own data we are keen to share our experience with the rest of the world and learn what we can from them and from shared initiatives," said Mr McKernan. |
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