Safe, quality systems and services, supporting quality care and outcomes
Quality and safety are at the heart of an effective, sustainable healthcare system. Improvements in quality and safety ensure fewer people are harmed, more lives are saved, and greater financial savings within the sector.
The Midland Quality and Safety Network supports quality and safe care services. It does this through quality improvement – a systematic, data-driven process for managing positive change for patient/population health outcomes. Quality improvement assumes that opportunities to improve are huge, that quality problems and solutions rest with the system as a whole, and that we can change.
The Midland Quality and Safety Network supports regional programmes, including medication safety, management of the deteriorating patient, infection prevention and control, falls prevention, pressure injury prevention, incident management systems. It also works closely with the Health Quality and Safety Commission to support the roll-out of national programmes including Partners in Care, Deteriorating Patient and Advanced Care Planning and Serious Illness Conversations, the National Patient Experience Survey, Infection Prevention and Control, and clinical and non-clinical staff development around the science of quality improvement.
To support this work, the Network uses an internationally recognised model for improvement, focused on continuous change made by rapid cycle testing. It also uses several patient safety approaches including investigating the cause of error using root cause analysis and why we get it right so often and how we do this.
The Network also uses quality improvement to ensure common approaches to measurement and an ability to collect data that reflects quality outcomes.
Who we are:
- Dr Sharon Kletchko, Lakes District Health Board and current Chair of the Quality and Safety Network;
- Debbie Brown, Bay of Plenty District Health Board;
- Anne Kemp, Taranaki District Health Board;
- Amelia Brown-Smith, Hauora Tairāwhiti District Health Board; and
- Mo Neville, Waikato District Health Board.
The Network is supported by Simone Heta-Pore, Lakes District Health Board.