Quality Corner

Quality Indicators for Radiation Oncology: a review of the clinical indicator set for the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards

The Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS) Clinical Indicator Program is the world’s largest dedicated clinical indicator data collection and reporting service. The program was established more than 30 years ago, and today the clinical indicators cover 22 specialty medical disciplines, including radiation oncology and radiology, and more than 600 healthcare organisations regularly submit data to the program.

The aim of the Clinical Indicator Program is to assist organisations to identify areas for improvement, by detecting variations within or between health services. Participating organisations submit data six-monthly through an online performance indicator reporting tool. Comparative reports are provided to submitters and The Australasian Clinical Indicator Report is a publicly available summary report which is published annually.

The reporting of clinical indicators to the ACHS is optional and is not a mandatory component of the accreditation process. However, subscription to the Clinical Indicator Program is free for ACHS accreditation members, and members are encouraged to submit indicator data to demonstrate continuous quality improvement.

To ensure that the indicators remain relevant to current practice, the indicator sets are regularly reviewed and updated as necessary. Recently, a multidisciplinary working group met to review the radiation oncology clinical indicator set.

The working party consisted of members with expertise in radiation oncology practice, management and administration, as well as a statistician and a consumer. We assessed each clinical indicator against its relevance for clinicians, whether it was practical and worthwhile to measure, and if there was consensus on how the data would be collected and reported.

The sixth iteration of the radiation oncology set now has eight indicators, covering issues such as waiting times, unscheduled treatment prolongation, treatment plan peer review and use of motion management.

Monitoring and measuring quality should be a focus for all radiation oncology departments. These clinical quality indicators provide a standardised measurement tool to allow comparisons both within a department over time and between departments. The Radiation Oncology Working Party encourage more departments to contribute data to this program.

Dr Rachel Effeney

Quality Improvement Committee