The Fine Balance of Risk and Benefit in Healthcare

Monday 23 February 2009

The Fine Balance of Risk and Benefit in Healthcare

SDHB, which has over 17000 patient discharges every year reported 18 potentially preventable serious and sentinel events during the period July 07- June 08 as part of the annual national report released today.

“Every event of this sort is awful for the patient concerned and their families, and also causes deep distress to staff, Divisional Director of Surgical Services David Tulloch said.

“Unfortunately nothing in medicine in risk free and incidents do occur – there is always the balance of benefit versus risk,” he said.

“What would be worse, though, would be not to do everything we can to learn from the event and try to put in place measures to stop it happening again. "

SDHB was the first DHB in the country to have staff take part in a national training programme (New Zealand Incident Management Systems) to further enhance quality and safety in the hospital. Over 80 clinical and management staff participated in the training programme, which presented current best practice in health safety and incident investigation.

The hospital continues to implement changes through its clinical governance framework including various initiatives to enhance patient safety.

“ Clinical leaders in the hospital initiated the development and trialling of quicker identification of patients whose condition deteriorates unexpectedly on the wards, Mr Tulloch said.

Early warning systems were also identified as a priority in the national report this year.

Mr Tulloch said that the Southland community had a right to expect safe, high quality health services, and for the most part those expectations were met.

“ I am encouraged that we are maintaining the active reporting of serious adverse events – I believe this reflects the safety culture in our hospitals, " he said.

ENDS

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