Quality, Safety & Risk

Heywood Rural Health (HRH) is committed to providing the community with safe, high-quality care and services.  At Heywood Rural Health we want every person to feel welcome, valued, and safe when they are in our care.

Our aim is to provide care and services that are:

• Personal – Being aware of and meeting your needs and preferences.
• Safe – Keeping you safe – physically, culturally & emotionally.
• Effective  – Making sure you get the right care in the right way, and
• Connected – Connecting you with care & services to support your health & well-being

Improvements

We are always looking at different ways we can improve the care and services to you as a member of our community and that means partnering with you so that you can contribute to identifying what needs to be improved and how we should do this.

Feedback that you provide us with is also a key to improving care and services at HRH. Your lived experience offers great value in terms of what we do well and what we might need to change so that positive outcomes are experienced for every person, every time.

Checking on how we are going

HRH undertakes internal and external reviews to evaluate the effectiveness of our systems and processes. Like all other health services, we closely monitor our performance on a wide range of quality and safety indicators, such as the number of clinical incidents that occur in our service (for example falls, pressure injury or medication errors). By doing this we ensure actions are taken to prevent and minimise the risk of further recurrence of adverse events and incidents that can cause harm.

Risk Management

Risk assessment and management is an important aspect of our quality and safety program. We consider risk management approaches in our everyday work by actively assessing and identifying risks so immediate actions can be taken to reduce the likelihood and/or consequences of the risk. This is an important step in our delivery of safe care to every person that engages with HRH.

Accreditation

At HRH our performance is also monitored by external agencies against the following quality and safety standards:

• National  Safety and Quality Health Service Standards
• Aged Care Quality Standards / Strengthened Aged Care Quality Standards
• Australian General Practice Accreditation Limited (AGPAL) standards

Compliance with these standards provides assurance and confidence to our patients, residents, clients and members of the community, that HRH delivers high quality and safe care.

Consumer, Carer and Community Participation

At HRH we want consumers (patients, residents and clients) to be actively involved in decision making about their health and healthcare. At the heart of this, is the flow of information between the consumer and HRH.

At HRH we understand and respect the unique needs and preferences of each person and strive to meet those needs in the right way and at the right time.

In addition to this we also want our consumers, carers and community members to be meaningfully involved in planning, decision making, monitoring and evaluation in our programs and services.

There are many ways we involve consumers, carers and community members at HRH such as:

• Using feedback received from our consumers and carers to make improvements across the organisation.
• Having consumers review brochures and patient/resident/client information guides to ensure it is meaningful and easy to read and understand.
• Involving consumers, carers and community members in committees and working groups.
• Consumer involvement in planning days, workshops and focus groups.