Safety and Quality of Services
APHA and private hospitals are proud of the standard of services provided in the sector. Regardless of whether they are operated on a for-profit or not-for-profit basis, private hospitals operate in a competitive environment. One of the key ways in which private hospitals seek to compete with each other and with the public sector is on the quality of their services. There is therefore a very strong imperative to maintain a high standard of safety and quality of services. However, the goal of quality services never has an end point and continuous improvement and benchmarking are essential ongoing activities.
APHA is most concerned about the duplication and overlap and accompanying compliance burden that characterises the measurement and reporting around the safety and quality of services in private hospitals. State and Territory licensing regimes, private health insurance fund contracting arrangements, accreditation agencies and State-based safety and quality agencies have all developed their own sets of measuring and reporting frameworks with which private hospitals must comply. This is wasteful and does little, if anything, to actually assure patient safety.
The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS) is an independent, non-for-profit organisation that has been an important part of the Australian healthcare industry since 1974. Healthcare organisations can assess, monitor and improve their services through participation in the ACHS accreditation programs. This provides healthcare organisations the opportunity to achieve their best possible levels of performance.
The ACHS releases biennial National Accreditation Reports, the purpose of which is to provide industry, consumers and the community an overview of the national accreditation performance. More importantly, the Report assists healthcare organisations in evaluating their performance and identifying areas and opportunities for improvements. In the latest Report produced by the ACHS (ACHS, 2007-08, pp. 22, Figure 21):
- 16 private organisations and hospitals were recognised for their leading practices by being awarded at least one Outstanding Achievement (OA) rating. This represents more than 44% of all organisations and hospitals recognised in this way.
These OA ratings were awarded against a range of criteria, including:
- Care planning and delivery
- Infection control system
- Continuous quality improvement
- Consumer participation in health services
- Consumer rights and responsibilities
- Governance structures
Productivity Commission has stated that, Hospital-standardised mortality ratios (HSMRs) can be used as an indicator of a hospitals underlying quality of service. This is because of two main reasons; 1) its intrinsic nature and 2) its relationship with other quality measures. According to the Productivity Commission, when looking at HSMRs scores the Commission found that:
- Private hospitals tend to have lower HSMRs scores than public hospitals by 12.2% on a median-score basis and 11.7% on mean-score basis. (PC, 2010b, pp. 68, Table 4.2)
