Page 3658 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 21 November 2007
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More of our services are now provided as an integrated whole, with the management of care across the community and hospital spectrum being managed by a single team. This greatly improves services for patients by focusing on their total care needs, not just their hospital or community-based requirements. All of this improvement is reflected in our key performance indicator measures for safety and quality.
The Stanhope Labor government is also committed to increasing the quality of service to our community. A good example of this is the ACT government’s support for the after-hours GP service. In May 2005 the ACT government launched a new model of after-hours general practice service in the ACT. The Canberra Afterhours Locum Medical Service, or CALMS, provides the new model of care delivery for after-hours GP services in the ACT.
Over the last few years, the ACT government has made significant changes to legislation that have assisted us in encouraging health professionals to participate in peer review processes. Peer review is now more systematic. The government has robust infrastructure to support clinical review and peer review in our health care system. We now have better information systems to identify and track indicators that could be useful in clinical review and in peer review. This builds on a much stronger and clearer policy framework.
The mandatory reporting of significant incidents is another policy introduced to identify and investigate clinical and corporate incidents as a response to a gap within the reporting of significant incidents. Of course, our aim is to have no significant incidents. However, the ACT government knows that there will be times when things go wrong. It is unfortunate, but this is a fact of the hospital system: things do sometimes go wrong. The purpose of the policy is to ensure that ACT Health adopts an effective, consistent and appropriate response to all significant incidents. This system not only provides a much better way of reporting and investigating significant events, but also provides valuable learning for the system to avoid repeats of such incidents in the future.
ACT Health reports quarterly to the ACT Legislative Assembly on four mandatory hospital-wide quality clinical indicators. This reporting provides the community with valuable information about the quality of their health services. Safety and quality experts from the ACT are working with their colleagues across Australia to develop additional safety and quality indicators to provide the community with more information about the safety of their public health services.
In May 2006, the government introduced a new policy related to complaints and concerns about the clinical competence of clinicians. This is another in the long list of initiatives to promote patient safety in the provision of health services. The policy provides a structured and procedurally fair process for identifying, referring and managing concerns about the clinical competence of clinicians.
In June 2005, the integrated risk management system, RiskMan, was implemented. By January last year, the full potential of the RiskMan system was realised and the project scope expanded to be an ACT Health-wide system. RiskMan is an online, real-
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