Quality
The Quality We Provide
Wimmera Health Care Group has developed an Improving Performance culture with the introduction of various strategies and initiatives to ensure that an effective quality control system is in place. The Group plans and undertakes many quality activities to continually assess how best to meet our customers needs.
Ensuring Quality
The Wimmera Health Care Group has been continuously accredited by the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS) since 1975 and as a result, our commitment to quality outcomes can clearly be demonstrated. This year the Group are about to participate in an external survey by ACHS against the accreditation system - EQuIP. The survey will compare the standard of patient care and support activities at Wimmera Health Care Group against the criteria of EQuIP.
Three ACHS appointed surveyors will spend 3 days at the Wimmera Health Car Group undertaking this assessment.
Clinical Risk Management
Clinical risk management was introduced to Wimmera Health Care Group in 1989, and is one of the longest running programs in Australia. The model developed here has been quite revolutionary and aspects of the model have been adopted by other health care facilities both in Australia and Overseas. In 2001 a manual describing the Wimmera Clinical Risk Management Model was published.
Clinical risk management is about reducing the probability of adverse events happening to patients. The Wimmera Health Care Group has developed a unique model of clinical risk management that involves firstly detecting adverse events then analysing their risk severity and taking appropriate action to prevent their recurrence.
Rarely do adverse events result from the actions of an individual, they are the result of faults and weaknesses in the systems we use to deliver health care. As part of the clinical risk management program, information is actively sought from numerous sources about possible faults and weaknesses in our health care delivery systems so that action can be taken to strengthen our systems and prevent similar adverse events from occurring. Sources of information from within Wimmera Health Care Group include incident reports completed by staff, review of medical records and review of patient / family complaints. Examples of sources of information from outside Wimmera Health Care Group include newspaper and journal articles. When an adverse event occurs in another hospital, we ask ourselves “could this happen here”? If the answer is yes, we take action before an adverse event occurs.
The clinical pathway program commenced in February 2000, evolving as a result of clinical risk management issues and an Australian Council on Healthcare Standards recommendation. The purpose of the clinical pathway program is to improve the quality of patient care by developing and introducing evidence based, multi-disciplinary pathways for specific disease processes into the acute services of Wimmera Health Care Group; and to continuously monitor and analyse key process measures.
A number of journal articles have been published describing the clinical risk management program. Publications have included: