Accreditation Performance Highlights The Need To Evaluate Care

Accreditation Performance Highlights the Need to Evaluate Care

9 December 2009

Many Australian healthcare organisations perform well in areas such as infection control and consumer participation, however more work needs to be done to evaluate performance to ensure consistency and promote ongoing improvement in these areas.

The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS) today released the third biennial National Report on Health Services Accreditation Performance. The Report examines the aggregate performance of 454 healthcare organisations in Australia against the ACHS accreditation standards, for the years 2007 and 2008.

Infection control was an area with a high variation of performance, with some organisations requiring improvement and others demonstrating extensive achievement.

"The varied results in infection control point to the need for wider adoption of national initiatives, improved staff education and knowledge within organisations, increased and standardised data collection of infection rates (with standardised definitions to support this)," commented ACHS Chief Executive, Mr Brian Johnston.

The most common recommendations for infection control related to the need to evaluate compliance with relevant policies and processes such as those relating to hand hygiene.

"From these results we see that organisations that perform well against the infection control standard tend to have invested effort in evaluating processes, staff training and measuring infection rates (utilising clinical indicators)," concluded Mr Johnston.

The organisations that performed well in standards relating to governance typically demonstrated evidence of strong links between their processes of risk management, strategic planning and quality improvement.

A key area for improvement is the lack of accreditation against the National Standards for Mental Health Services. Participation rates for In-Depth Mental Health Reviews were low (24 reviews in total). It is anticipated that more organisations will engage in this important review process when the Commonwealth Government implements the revised National Standards for Mental Health Services (expected in 2010).

For a copy of the complete Report visit www.achs.org.au

Media information: Communications Manager, Megan Taylor, 02 9281 9955 or 0416 280 826

Established in 1974, the ACHS is Australia's leading healthcare accreditation agency and is recognised by the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) for both its standards and accreditation program. Over 1050 individual hospitals and healthcare organisations are members of ACHS quality improvement programs.


SOURCE: Australian Council on Healthcare Standards