Page 3165 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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That is why we have the patient safety and quality unit. We established it to improve patient safety. We are now implementing a whole series of further improvements to patient safety and quality, of which one of them is an audit to check compliance with the paperwork associated with the surgeons’ pre-safety checks. There is a range of compliance.
This actually should be a good story for the health system, because what it is demonstrating is that we are putting in place measures to protect patient safety. We are not only just putting them there; we are then going back and checking on whether they are being followed and, when they are not being followed, following up with those surgeons and talking with them about how to make it work for them.
Anyone who has had any practical experience of working in a hospital will know that surgeons will not do things when they think it impacts on their work time. So what we have to do—and this might be strange for the opposition, again—is to sit around the table with the surgeons and ask them, if they are not filling out the safety checklist, why, and how can we make it easier for them to participate in this? It is the ongoing, important work of continuous improvement and improvements to patient safety and quality in any health system. That is what is being done at the hospital and the hospital should be applauded for it.
MR HANSON: A supplementary.
MR SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Hanson.
MR HANSON: The minute states that the completion rate is 52 per cent. Is Elizabeth Trickett wrong, or have you just misled the Assembly?
MS GALLAGHER: The compliance rate is with the checklist, Mr Hanson—and this is the difference. There is a difference between filling out a checklist and actually conducting the safety checks that occur in the lead-up to an operation, because it is not just about filling out a checklist. That is not the only thing that gets done. The compliance rate is with the checklist. That varies across specialties. In orthopaedics, where Mrs Thatcher had the adverse event, their compliance rate is 100 per cent. In other areas, like plastic surgery, it is very low, at four per cent.
Mr Hanson: Four per cent.
MS GALLAGHER: Yes, very low. So what we have to do is go back to the plastic surgeons and say, “How can we encourage you to take this part of your job seriously?” We are dealing with VMOs, we are dealing with staff specialists, we are dealing with busy people, and that is what we have to do. We do it through the surgical services task force. And what is more, we do not just accept and put that in place. We then go back and Ms Trickett is then auditing that process. That is the situation—taking patient safety and quality of care seriously. Some specialties have adapted to it very well; others need more improvement to the results that we are seeing.
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