Glynis Schultz, Executive Director

From July 1, short notice assessments with ACHS, can occur at any time when Community and Oral Health will be assessed against the eight National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards.

This process supports us to continuously improve the healthcare we deliver to our patients and consumers, and provide confidence that we are maintaining the standards:

• Standard 1 – Clinical Governance
• Standard 2 – Partnering with Consumers
• Standard 3 – Preventing and Controlling Infection
• Standard 4 – Medications Safety
• Standard 5 – Comprehensive Care
• Standard 6 – Communicating for Safety
• Standard 7 – Blood Management
• Standard 8 – Recognising and Responding to Clinical Deterioration in Acute Health Care.

As always, I commend the work you are doing to provide safe quality care not just for accreditation but every day.

In today’s message we will dive down into standard 2 and 8, our priorities and what each of us can do to improve the care we provide.

Standard 2: Partnering with consumers (Lead – Claire Harrison)

Standard intention

To create health service organisations where there are mutually beneficial outcomes by having:

• consumers as partners in planning, design, delivery, measurement and evaluation of systems and services, and
• patients as partners in their own care, to the extent that they choose.

To recognise the importance of involving patients in their own care and providing clear communication to patients.

This standard, together with the Clinical Governance Standard, underpins all the other standards.

COH priorities

• Ensuring there is documented evidence in the patient record of shared decision making.
• Supporting our patients to provide feedback on their care.
• Ensuring consumers receive the information they need in a way that is appropriate for them.
• Ensuring Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people receive health care that meets their needs.
• Actioning the Metro North Policy to support families and loved ones visiting the people in our care.

What can you do?

• Ensure patients are aware of the many ways they can provide feedback on their care.
• Provide patients with a copy of the Australian Health Care Charter of Rights.
• Document discussions about treatments, procedures and consent.
• Ensure families and loved ones know that our bedded services have flexible visiting hours.
• Organise cultural support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people in our care.
• Utilise the patient bedside communication boards in our bedded services.

Standard 6: Communicating for Safety (Lead – Kate Schultz)

Standard intention

To ensure timely, purpose-driven and effective communication and documentation that support continuous, coordinated and safe care for patients.

To describe the systems and processes to support effective communication at all transitions of care:

• when critical information emerges or changes;
• to ensure correct patient identification and procedure matching; and
• to ensure essential information is documented in the patient’s healthcare record.

COH priorities

• Improving structure and content of clinical handover by knowing what information you need to pass on and having access to these documents for handover.
• Conducting clinical handover observational audits across all disciplines.

What can you do?

• When including patients in bedside clinical handover always check the three patient identifiers – name, DOB, UR number.
• Encourage patients and carers to ask questions and to feel comfortable to talk with you about critical information.
• Be clear, legible, concise and accurate in your documentation, and write so that anyone that is not present
  at the time of recording can understand the information.

Glynis.