Enabling your organisation to provide high-quality care
Mr Michael Gorton AM is a lawyer and Board Chair of Monash Health, Wellways Australia and Holmesglen Institute and Victorian TAFE Association. He explains why every board member should take responsibility for good clinical governance.
If you’re on the board of a health service, you have responsibilities for both corporate governance and clinical governance.
Corporate governance is about governing the organisation as a whole – it includes responsibilities such as audit, risk, insurance, finances and staffing. These things apply to every enterprise, whether it’s in the health sector, making widgets or doing anything else.
But because you’re a health service, you also have the responsibilities for clinical governance. Clinical governance is how the board and executive put in place the right systems, structures and resources that support the organisation to provide high-quality care to patients. That’s because the core business of a health service is providing care.
For example, in a board meeting in the health services I chair, we discuss all the responsibilities of corporate governance – we’re all directors and we’re all thinking about our responsibilities as directors.
And then we turn to our core business, which is making people healthy again. That’s the enterprise that needs to be looked after. If either corporate governance fails or clinical governance fails, it’s bad for the enterprise.
Mr Michael Gorton* AM
Every director needs to understand what the core business of the organisation is, and we just come at it from different perspectives.
For example, if you sit on the Finance Committee, you are dealing with the finances of the health service. But when making decisions, you should also have patients front of mind. Go and have a walk around the emergency department or the wards to understand the issues and how your decisions will contribute to improving care.
Corporate governance and clinical governance are completely entwined in a health service. Good corporate governance means we can be sure that with the work that we do – our core reason for being – we get it right.
*Mr Gorton is Chair of the Commission’s Clinical Governance Advisory Committee.