It is compulsory for healthcare organisations to report incidents that affect, or may affect, client safety. But are these reports leading to continuous quality improvement?
Your records will include data on unplanned or unintended events and circumstances that could have or did result in harm. This includes things such as falls, pressure injuries and skin tears etc1. How can such incidents be prevented in future, at client and organisation level? Care-Metric Ltd assists facilities in analysing their incident reports through the use of Statistical Process Control (SPC) methodology.
This informs organisations about the variation in their type of incidents. It also identifies whether they were caused by current processes (“common cause variation”) or something outside of this (“special cause variation”). With this understanding in hand, we can identify, even over a short period of time, whether changes are leading to sustainable improvements, and saving resources. The reports are very easy to understand, and can be used to motivate staff to make further improvements.
Care-Metric Ltd can support you in this process by providing a user-friendly online tool and regular progress reports, in graph form. Alternatively, you can send us your anonymised data (in a spreadsheet) and we will provide you with the SPC graphs, along with a simple narrative to make the findings clear.
Please contact us if you want to know more this methodology, which will help you analyse safety data in a meaningful way.
1. New South Wales Clinical Excellence Commission Open Disclosure Handbook– Chapter 2
Do you have columns of data that you need to present in a clear, user-friendly way? We can do it for you in a jiffy!
It’s about knowing what kind of graph will make your point most clearly: a funnel chart, control chart, scatter plot etc — and then making it look great, along with a few words that capture the most accurate interpretation of the data.
You can contact us here.