It is a common sight in hospitals as doctors and nurses make their rounds assessing patient needs and providing care. It is not uncommon as managers, support staff like HIM/MR professionals, and others in a hospital also make their rounds around their tasks assessing processes and resources and exercise set professional standards to their daily work, thereby understanding how processes can be more efficient, how resources can be used more wisely, and physical risks(safety) to the patients and staff can be reduced.
Thus, quality and safety is entrenched in the needs and care of patients as individual health care professionals and other staff execute their daily work.
As these individual health care professionals and other staff go about their daily work, the organisation continuously plans, designs, measures, analyses, and improves clinical and managerial processes to achieve maximum benefit from its quality and safety efforts.
It is no doubt to my mind that all these efforts to get quality and safety measures well organised requires no less clear leadership, needs some kind of mechanism and an organisational framework to oversee and improve those processes. As most clinical care processes, managerial processes and quality issues are interrelated and involve more than one department or unit and may involve many individual jobs, accentuates the need for clear leadership, a mechanism to work around with the help of an organisational framework for quality and safety.
This framework will develop greater leadership support for an organisation wide program, train and involve more staff, set clearer priorities for what to measure, base decisions on measurement data, and make improvements based on comparison to other organisations, nationally and internationally.
The framework and the mechanism to guide quality improvement and patient safety efforts in a hospital rest with a quality improvement and patient safety oversight group or committee.
All of the above explains the “quality oversight mechanism“ I talked about in the post JCI Standard MCI.19.4 – Patient Clinical Record.
Abridged, and adapted from Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (QPS), Governance, Leadership, and Direction (GLD), and Management of Communication and Information (MCI) chapters of the JOINT COMMISSION INTERNATIONAL ACCREDITATION STANDARDS FOR HOSPITALS, 4th Edition
