One of the fundamentals of quality and safety in healthcare is to embed a strategy for continuous quality improvement and to never stop trying to become better. As part of our service, accountability and commitment to you, we believe that we should continuously look to improve and build on the service that we provide.
We want to make sure that the care we provide to the individual (as well as all of our practice population) is effective, evidence based, safe and focuses on prevention as well as illness.
We do this by measuring what we do, including measurements based around the experience of our patients, what our patients report about their health, as well as health and prevention measures on our population of patients. We have set up a dashboard of performance on this website. By using and tracking these measures, and by discussing these issues at regular staff meetings, we believe that we can look after and help improve the health of our patients even when they are not physically present at the practice. By sharing what we do well, and where we need to improve, we are committed to being part of a transparent learning health system.
Practice Improvement Program for Quality Improvement
The Commonwealth government has set up a national Practice Improvement Program (PIPQI) focused on quality improvement. Along with thousands of practices across the country, we receive quarterly grants to assist the practice in this improvement. We also provide de-identified information to our Primary Health Network (PHN), who collate information across the region to identify where population health can be improved. In accordance with Australian Privacy Law as well as our practice privacy policy, no personal identifying information is ever released in this process, and the risk of identification is practically zero. If however, you feel that you do not want any of your de-identified information released, please let us know- we have the capability of excluding your information.
Our dashboard and some of these things we measure are described in more detail below. This page contains links and data that guides some of our quality improvement work and will be updated frequently. We always value your feedback. We thank the staff of Wentwest, our PHN, who have helped and guided us in this quality improvement journey.
