The objectives of the Commission's National Indicators project are to:
- Enhance the quality and safety focus in national health data standards and indicators
- Drive improvement in safety and quality at local levels through fostering supportive feedback
- Improve transparency and accountability in reporting on healthcare safety and quality
The Commission has identified six principal domains for developing meaningful patient safety and quality national datasets in Australia:
1. Core, hospital-based outcomes indicators
2. Patient safety reporting for hospitals.
The Commission, together with the States and Territories, is developing a national patient safety measurement model for hospital safety. The aim is to understand hospital adverse event rates, in order to inform and support patient safety programs.
3. Patient experience and patient satisfaction in hospitals
Information about the experience of patients is particularly important to support local quality improvement. In most hospitals, patient experience surveying is already used to improve performance locally.
The focus of this work is to complement the annual national Patient Experience Survey with a set of core, common, hospital-level survey questions to be integrated into all hospital surveys.
4. Practice-level indicators of safety and quality for primary health care
This project aims to develop a national set of practice-level indicators of safety and quality for primary healthcare.
The consultation on the candidate set of indicators commenced from 14 September 2011 and closed on 25 October 2011. The Consultation Paper is available at Practice-level indicators of safety and quality for primary health care.
5. Clinically specific measures of appropriateness and effectiveness.
To ensure that patients receive the most appropriate and the most effective care for their particular clinical conditions, it is essential that consistent and comprehensive data are available to measure and report patterns of care in a way that identifies, by facility and region.
In 2012, the Commission will commence work with healthcare providers, a range of agencies and specialist organisations to identify succinct national sets of condition-specific healthcare quality indicators.
6. Whole-of-system
The Commission is working to develop a report on whole-of-system markers of healthcare quality. The intent is to demonstrate, where indicator selection and data availability permit, trends over time and Australia’s performance against OECD nations
Contact
Neville Board
Information Strategy Manager
(02) 9126 3587
Email: mail@safetyandquality.gov.au
