National Forum - 19 March 2009
Sponsors
- The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Healthcare
- The NSW Clinical Excellence Commission (CEC)
Collaborating organisations
PURPOSE
The workshop was held to present and critically review measures of mortality that can be used to support improvement in the safety and quality of health care, in order to:
- Understand current approaches to measuring mortality rates, their utility and limitations
- Identify appropriate approaches to using mortality data to improve health care quality and accountability through mortality monitoring and review
Program and Presentations
Forum Report (PDF 1170 KB)
FOCUS
The key areas for discussion were:
- Strengths and limits of the current methodologies for generating Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs), age-standardised healthcare-amenable mortality, and Variable Life Adjusted Displays (VLADs)
- Approaches to presentation and feedback systems
- How to use these data to improve safety and quality - the model and process for responding to significant variations
The keynote presentation described the Canadian journey to public reporting of hospital standardised mortality ratios.
Three measures of mortality were presented in the Australian context:
- Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs)
- Age-standardised mortality rates amenable to health care
- Variable Life-Adjusted Displays (VLADs)
The AIHW was engaged by the Commission to do a report on Hospital Standardised Mortality Ratios (HSMRs) in Australia.
The report is titled Measuring and reporting mortality in hospital patients (PDF 1562 KB), is available from the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare publications website.
