DIVISION OF WOMEN’S HEALTH
AUTHOR
MARY BURR
LYN STARK
General Manager, Women’s Health
Maternity Quality and Safety Coordinator
Quality & Safety Structure The Women’s Health division has a number of committees, forums and roles that support quality, risk and safety; innovation, continuous improvement and excellence are the key areas of focus. Our quality assurance activities include measuring, reporting and improving on the division’s performance against care standards, key performance indicators and clinical indicators; ensuring controlled documents are current; and managing certification and audit processes. We maintain a focus on optimising patient safety, especially when reviewing adverse events and debriefing with women and whaanau after events have occurred.
services, and identify opportunities to improve the care and services we provide. Figure 1
Complaints and compliments received by Women’s Health, January to December 2020 35 30 25 20 15 10 5
The Women’s Health Clinical Governance Group and the Maternity Quality and Safety Governance Group have a combined Maternity Quality Improvement Plan (see page 146). This provides transparency and oversight for the range of quality activities that occur across all areas of maternity services. A Women’s Health (Obstetric and Midwifery) Controlled Document Coordination Group provides a multidisciplinary approach to updating policies, procedures and guidelines and helps develop new controlled documents. We established three groups during 2020 to improve our oversight and action for Women’s Health quality and safety:
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Complaints
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Other forums and meetings are held to discuss and share learnings. These include regular ongoing morbidity meetings, perinatal and maternal mortality meetings and serious adverse event presentations, group emails, brief summaries at shift change overs, access holders meetings and our Women’s Health monthly eUpdate Koorero. This annual report also forms an important part of the learning loop related to our ongoing service development and continuous improvement.
• the quality and risk manager re-instigated a monthly quality and risk forum to centralise all quality-related activities
Groups
• the deputy chief midwife and a senior medical officer initiated a multidisciplinary morbidity review forum
The Women’s Health Clinical Governance Group is the divisional body mandated to discuss clinical departmental and hospital-wide issues and make decisions as required. This includes providing a forum for clinicians and management to discuss the performance and direction of the division; confirming new policies and reviewing existing policies; reviewing regular reporting of quality and risk, clinical efficiency and financial sustainability; setting the direction for future planning of facilities and the workforce; and ensuring
• the general manager commenced a monthly Women’s Health complaints and incident trends meeting. Overall, the compliments the division receives outnumber the complaints, as shown in Figure 1. We review both complaints and compliments to identify themes to understand what works well for women accessing our
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Women’s Health Clinical Governance Group
