Patient Safety

Health Waikato aims to provide high quality care for our patients.

However incidents regularly occur which harm our patients and our staff.

We know that many are preventable and we will continue to focus on reducing these as a priority.

Adverse events have major implications for the patients, the health professionals involved and affect the organisation because the wider community questions our reputation when we fail to meet the high standards of care our patients expect of us.

Adverse events also result in wasted Waikato DHB resources. We must improve our performance by reducing avoidable errors and continue that every year. To do this will involve looking at many of our systems and processes and making improvements that enhance the patient experience and journey, as well as achieve better outcomes.

Our six priorities are:

• reduce medication errors
• reduce patient falls
• ensure that clinical audit is carried out in every clinical unit
• set up the Health Waikato mortality committee to reduce avoidable mortality
• improve our hand hygiene practices
• implement a safe patient care programme.

See how we did in 2010-2011 with our Quality Report.

Patient safety is everyone’s business as we strive for a culture of ‘no avoidable deaths and no avoidable harm’. These are key thrusts of international patient safety campaigns and it is appropriate for us to understand and learn from what others are doing and to implement similar strategies here.

Health Waikato has quality co-ordinator positions for each service area and as patient safety champions they are integral to the roll out of much of the work needed to achieve this plan. Quality improvement projects achieve indirect savings because of the reduction in error rates associated with following robust processes, giving patients the right treatment in the right place by the right person, as one example.

The quality co-ordinators work closely with clinical and management staff, and the established Waikato DHB quality and risk service. The quality co-ordinators strengthen the current quality focus and allow us to make good strides forward.

Patient safety is a major concern and one we all must take seriously. Adopting a rigorous programme of continuous improvement that targets improving patient safety will be integral to how we do business.

Patient Safety at Health Waikato: a continuous improvement.