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Clinical handover encompasses the transference of vital patientcentric information to ensure the continuity of care and optimise patient safety.
The National Safety and Quality Health Care Service (NSQHS) Standards provide Australian health care facilities with opportunities to communicate their patient safety quality improvement processes. Currently Standard 6 itemises clinical handover measures for organisations to describe their continued efforts to minimise risk that may result in miscommunication and/or fragmented care. However, Standard 6 has been shown to exclude many high-risk handover episodes and the draft NSQHS Standard 'Communication for Safety' is proposed to replace Standard 6. This report provides perioperative leaders with a series of recommendations to follow when undertaking a quality improvement initiative and subsequently presenting the project as evidence under the revised Communication for Safety Standard.
Background
To ensure the public is provided with safe and reliable care, The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (the Commission) developed a national evidence-based assessment process, which enables organisations to communicate their patient safety achievements. Throughout Australia, the NSQHS Standards are a mandatory set of quality measures health care organisations reference when presenting evidence of patientsafety governance processes, consumer engagement and quality improvement achievements1. In 2011, the state/territory health ministers endorsed the NSQHS Standards and, to date, the Commission retains the legislative responsibility for maintaining and implementing the NSQHS Standards.
Currently Standard 6 of the NSQHS Standards details the clinical handover measures organisations are required to present during an ACHS accreditation assessment. However, following the Commission's recent evaluation of the NSQHS Standards, Standard 6 was found to focus exclusively on shift-toshift handover and suggested this be recategorised to encompass all forms of communication for safety. The 2015 draft version of the NSQHS Standards requires health care facilities to provide governance and organisational systems that support effective communication that promotes the delivery of continuous, coordinated and safe care for consumers2.
Within the draft NSQHS Standards, the Communication for Safety Standard includes all episodes whereby the transfer of information ensures the continuity of care, as well as positive patient identification and procedure matching, which were previously in a separate Standard2. It is anticipated that the revised NSQHS Standards will be in effect by 2017-18, and that the revised Communication for Safety Standard will require organisations...