Quality and Safety

Eastern Health is committed to ensuring delivery of safe, high quality care and services. The Eastern Health Clinical Governance Standard details a number of key structures and processes which enhance decision-making, accountability, continuous evaluation and improvement of care and service delivery. Eastern Health undertakes internal and external reviews to evaluate the effectiveness of our systems and processes. Eastern Health informs and advises consumers and communities of how we ensure quality and safety and clinical governance through the annual Quality Account.

The Centre for Patient Experience provides a framework, systems and support for effective community, consumer (patient/client resident) and carer participation and oversees the patient experience strategy.

Our strategic and annual planning processes involve consumers and use information and data from incident reporting, patient feedback, audits, reviews and clinical and performance indicators to ensure we provide harm free care to our patients. In line with the Department of Health and Human Services incident management policy, Eastern Health investigates all reported incidents to ensure actions are taken to prevent/minimise further recurrence of adverse events and incidents.

Eastern Health maintains an audit program that measures and monitors clinical practice across identified areas of high clinical risk. Additionally clinical streams undertake mortality and morbidity review processes on a regular basis.

There are Expert Advisory Committees established to provide additional oversight for areas of high risk including falls, cognition, pressure injury, medication safety and blood administration.
Risk assessment and management is an important aspect of our approach to governance. We believe the adoption of a formal approach to risk management improves decision-making, performance, accountability and outcomes. The risk-management policy ensures a coordinated, organisation-wide approach to risk management. It is designed to provide opportunity for improvement in patient safety and the provision of efficient, high quality services and importantly, ensure risk-management is seen as a core component of Eastern Health service delivery.

As a progressive, responsive and innovative health service, we demonstrate our commitment to excellence through external accreditation against a broad range of health system standards, including the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards. Compliance with these industry standards provides assurance and confidence to ourselves, our patients and the community that Eastern Health delivers the highest quality of care.

Eastern Health uses all of the measures related to quality of care to analyse and understand key areas of focus and priority through the annual patient safety report. A quarterly newsletter titled “Safety Matters” is also produced to communicate key patient safety and quality learning to all staff.

Consumer, Carer and Community Participation at Eastern Health
At Eastern Health we want consumers (patients, clients and residents) and carers to be actively involved in decision making about their treatment and care. We also want our consumers, carers and community members to be meaningfully involved in planning, decision making, monitoring and evaluation in our programs and services.

There are many ways we involve consumers, carers and community members at Eastern Health such as:

•   Getting feedback from our consumers and carers and using this feedback to make improvements
•   Getting feedback about patient information to ensure that it is meaningful
•   Involving consumers, carers and community members in committees and working groups
•   Consumer involvement in planning days, workshops and focus groups

We have established a Community Advisory Committee and consumer register as ways for interested people to get involved.

To ensure that Eastern Health involves consumers, carers and community members in as many ways as possible we have developed a Participation & Responsiveness Plan entitled Partnering with our Consumers, Carers & Community. You can access the plan for the link below and read our annual progress reports.