Page 172 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 8 December 2004
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may be advanced to level 2 on a personal basis, significantly expanding nurses’ opportunities for career advancement.
New on-call allowances are competitive with the rest of the country and support for nurses’ continuing professional development is significant, with three days professional development leave and a further two days each year allocated to maintaining and extending nursing skills. The ACT is also a leader in paid parental leave, the flexibility of its personal leave entitlements and its family friendly and work/life balance initiatives. That said, the government will continue to focus on opportunities for assistance in nursing as well. This is an important initiative to address work force shortages over the longer term.
I would now like to move to the area of information management technology. ACT Health is a major user of IT in government, with complex needs and highly sensitive data that needs good management. We are soon to launch the ACT Health IM and IT strategic plan, which will set out information management and information technology directions over the next five years. This strategy addresses the increasing global dependency of health services on IT to support the complexity of service delivery, as well as to meet the demand for improved quality, safety and efficiency in health.
In the ACT, the public health sector has traditionally focused its IT budget on administrative support systems. The most significant project undertaken by ACT Health and its predecessors in the last 10 years has been the community care information system designed to improve the coordination of service delivery across Community Health. However over the same period there has been inadequate corresponding investment in clinical information systems, where the need has been just as great. This has brought about a proliferation of small, non-integrated and poorly supported systems.
By Australian teaching hospital standards, ACT Health is poorly served by its IM and IT systems. To address this, the ACT IM and IT strategic plan is designed to improve the quality of health care by providing information to health care providers to support improved decision making at the point of care.
The main objectives of the strategy are to:
• integrate patient administration systems across ACT Health, including the Canberra Hospital, Community Health and Mental Health;
• establish a common patient identifier across the system;
• continue the development of a comprehensive patient electronic record, including future appointments and treatment plans;
• facilitate better exchange of information between ACT Health and external care providers such as GPs;
• allow GPs to receive discharge referral information and results, as well as providing a mechanism for GPs to book appointments for ACT Health services; and
• implement key clinical systems, including order entry and results reporting, electronic storage and delivery of medical images and electronic medication management.
We will also continue to develop an enterprise reporting architecture to provide management with a coherent and timely view of the organisation’s performance.
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