Page 1637 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 9 May 2018
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I want to join with ACT Health staff and assure Canberra families that the Centenary Hospital for Women and Children is a safe and modern facility providing quality care. In fact the patient experience discharge survey from the past year showed that 93 per cent of mothers with experience at Centenary were satisfied with the service they received. But as I noted yesterday and note again today, we will continue to work with staff and the Canberra community about how best to manage maternity services across our city.
As members are aware, ACT Health is currently undergoing a re-accreditation against the 10 national safety and quality health service standards. All public and private hospitals in Australia undergo this process and I am advised close to 25 per cent of hospitals do not initially meet all the core criteria they are assessed against during the accreditation process.
The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards conducted an organisation-wide survey of ACT Health between 19 and 23 March. During this survey ACHS assessed ACT Health’s implementation of the national standards. The report shows ACT Health met 176 core criteria against the 10 national standards but also assessed 33 of the core criteria under five of the 10 national standards were not met. It provided ACT Health with a remediation period of 90 days. ACT Health will be reassessed on those core actions through a process called an advanced completion survey. Two surveyors will conduct an advanced completion survey on-site at Canberra Hospital and Health Services between 3 and 5 July.
The ACHS survey team have 10 working days following this survey to submit their report to ACT Health, and ACT Health then have five working days from receipt of the report to review and provide a response to the ACHS, which takes that date to 26 July. I will be pleased to provide the Assembly with an update on this process in June.
Substantial work is underway to address the “not met” core criteria as outlined during yesterday’s debate. The re-accreditation process is an opportunity to identify areas of improvement to ensure ACT Health continues to deliver high quality and safe health care to our community. It is important to also emphasise though that improving quality and safety is an ongoing process in the health system and this does not start or end with accreditation. There is significant work underway every day in our healthcare system that is focused on quality and patient safety.
We have many dedicated people working in our health workforce: doctors, nurses, allied health workers and many more. These people are there to ensure the community receives the highest level of health care and I commend them for the outstanding job that they do.
The accreditation report highlights many of the good and outstanding things that Health does, and I do want to acknowledge this, in particular noting it makes mention of the high quality ACT Health quality strategy that was launched in February this year. But for now the focus for ACT Health must be on addressing those “not met” core criteria, and it is.
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