Mastering Safer and Reliable Practice

Description

Reducing risk through practical techniques to improve the quality and safety of healthcare delivery

Modern healthcare has applied the scientific method to produce life transforming interventions. There is now an expectation that this same scientific rigour will lead to care being implemented as safely and reliably as possible. The serious burden of avoidable adverse outcomes and associated patient dissatisfaction has led to calls for all in healthcare to embrace the quality improvement agenda.

Healthcare professionals are being urged to maximise the quality of care provided to their patients by reducing the unwanted variation in the delivery of therapeutic or preventative regimes that their patients receive.

Increasing the reliability and safety of healthcare delivery maximises the chances of optimum patient outcomes and reduces the risk to all healthcare professionals of complaints, claims or regulatory body censure.

The Mastering Safer and Reliable Practice workshop provides healthcare professionals with knowledge, insights, essential strategies and practical tools to maximise their delivery of reliable and safer clinical care.

Course Program

Drawing on a wide range of expertise, research and experience the workshop explores:

• the extent to which low reliability in the delivery of healthcare has been identified as a risk for patients, clinicians and healthcare organisations
• key personal factors that have been identified as potential barriers to achieving high reliability in all ‘high stakes’ delivery systems
• people and process factors that can facilitate or impede human performance
• the use of a reliability index to classify improvement strategies and predict their likely success
• the research examining the balance between necessary individual autonomy (designed to preserve the essential role of individual healthcare professionals’ judgment) and the level of standardisation essential to avoid unwanted variation that poses risk to patients
• lessons that can be learnt from non-healthcare high reliability systems
• simple, practical ways to ensure that the most critical areas of risk are identified.

Workshop participants will examine a number of approaches and devices developed by the Cognitive Institute to assist them implement the science of reliability.

These tools assist participants to identify areas of significant risk, engage with colleagues to improve reliability and examine and redesign processes essential to the delivery of high reliability.