Transform quality improvement processes into a finely tuned engine

Ongoing monitoring and improvements in healthcare provision are crucial for hospitals to maintain compliance with the National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards.

They’re assessed against these Standards to ensure they have systems in place that support safe and good quality care, and identify and manage risks of harm.¹

This consistent national approach to assessment provides the opportunity to compare outcomes and identify areas for improvement. It’s also the basis for reporting to patients, carers and consumers, with results of hospital assessments available online².

More efficient quality improvement needed

Quality improvements can propel ongoing upgrades in healthcare provision and strengthen compliance to the NSQHS Standards — as long as they’re launched, completed, and disseminated efficiently.

Hospital teams may find they duplicate efforts and experience roadblocks to collaboration. There’s no simple way for projects to be prioritised, for new people to join a team, or for team members to document and track a project’s evolution. Teams may have no standard workflow and no way to easily communicate or get feedback on a specific stage of a quality improvement project.

According to the NSQHS Standards User Guide for Governing Bodies: “There is increasing recognition that paper-based reporting is limiting, and that governing bodies should use a blend of soft and hard intelligence. A mix of information and data sources are needed to support quality improvement and monitoring.”³

Assessment outcomes against the Standards

First edition January 2013 - December 20184

All hospitals and day procedure services accredited at least once

906 health service organisations completed two assessment cycles

67% (609) met all core actions at initial assessment at first accreditation cycle

74% (672) met all core actions at second accreditation cycle

 

Second edition Hospitals and day procedure services January 2019 - December 20215

60% completed assessments

74% of assessments met requirements at initial assessment

1 not accredited

20 required mandatory re-assessment

7 with significant risks identified

               

Organise and standardise quality programs

When looking at your compliance with the NSQHS Standards, you must also examine your process for maintaining that compliance, including:

• Real-time visibility into all projects
• Standardised, configurable templates
• Collaboration capabilities
• Integrated search and full-text retrieval
• Artificial intelligence-driven literature appraisal
• Automated evidence synthesis and project reporting

Together, these capabilities can help hospitals transform your safety and quality improvement processes into a finely tuned engine that supports compliance with the NSQHS Standards.

Ovid® Synthesis Clinical Evidence Manager offers a single, cohesive view of projects and reduces duplication while also fostering collaboration within projects by streamlining the literature search, appraisal process, implementation, and dissemination.

This solution will take clinical practice improvement projects to the next level to ensure high quality based on the latest research insights and evidence, and support hospitals with your NSQHS Standards compliance.

For more information: wltrsklwr.com/ovid-synthesis.

^{1 Consumer fact sheet 2: Accreditation of health service organisations. ACSQHC.
2 www.safetyandquality.gov.au/consumers/public-reporting-hospital-performance-nsqhs-standards
3 www.safetyandquality.gov.au/sites/default/files/2019-11/nsqhs_standards_user_guide_for_governing_bodies.pdf
4 The state of patient safety and quality in Australian hospitals 2019. Sydney; ACSQHC, 2019.
5 www.safetyandquality.gov.au/standards/nsqhs-standards/implementation-nsqhs-standards/nsqhs-standards-lessons-learnt}