Safety program benchmarking

This means that senior management is not only committed to and supports safety, but that it insists on safety performance in a manner that is clearly understood and echoed at all levels. Objectives are set and organisations work towards set targets for implementation of the objectives.

Safety personnel report in at the highest level in the organisations. They have mainly an advisory function. Management and supervision drives the safety program not the safety personnel.

Induction training and detailed safety training for supervisors and managers was high on the priority list. Regular safety meetings were seen as important.

Contractors were expected to perform at the same safety level as permanent employees. Notify me of new posts by email. More Posts from this Category. One of the fascinating things about the Coronavirus pandemic is watching Safety morph into epidemiology expertise.

I would like a dollar for every flyer, presentation, podcast, powerpoint, checklist template, toolbox talk and poster set that had jumped into my inbox… Read the rest. In the early s, benchmarking referred to comparing products, services and methods against those of the best organizations in the sector. Benchmarking referred mainly to competitive analysis or industrial analysis.

These methods are still considered to be benchmarking, but numerous other elements have been added Pitarelli and Monnier In , for the first time, G. Balm defined benchmarking as a CQI approach. Extending beyond the simple collection of information and comparisons with competitors, it became based on an exchange that allowed organizations to understand how best performances were achieved so that they could adapt the best ideas to their own practices. Finally, it also involved focusing on comparative measures that are of interest to the organization's users Balm ; Pitarelli and Monnier Benchmarking made its first appearance in the healthcare system in with the requirements of the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations JCAHO in the United States, which defined it as a measurement tool for monitoring the impact of governance, management and clinical and logistical functions Braillon et al.

Few definitions were adapted to the healthcare sector. Among them, that of Ellis summarized benchmarking in healthcare as a process of comparative evaluation and identification of the underlying causes leading to high levels of performance.

Benchmarking must respond to patients' expectations. It involves a sustained effort to measure outcomes, compare these outcomes against those of other organizations to learn how those outcomes were achieved, and apply the lessons learned in order to improve. To implement benchmarking, all the authors stress the need for useful, reliable and up-to-date information.

This ongoing process of information management is called surveillance. This information surveillance, the first foundation of benchmarking, facilitates and accelerates the benchmarking process. A second foundation consists of learning, sharing information and adopting best practices to modify performance.

Like all continuous improvement methods, benchmarking fits within the conceptual framework of Deming's wheel of quality Bonnet et al. The different descriptions vary in the number of steps, depending on how the steps are grouped, and each approach has its own value.

The literature offers several examples of step groupings. For one organization, Bonnet and colleagues proposed a benchmarking method adapted for an anaesthesia—resuscitation service that consisted of 12 steps grouped into four phases.

In this paper we describe the example of Pitarelli and Monnier , which has nine steps:. The authors recommend not starting the analysis too soon, before the process has been prepared: determine those products that are important for the organization what , decide on whom to compare yourself against who and give careful consideration to data collection how Pitarelli and Monnier ; Woodhouse et al. Benchmarking can be carried out internally in very large organizations e.

The advantage of internal benchmarking is that it is rapid and not too expensive, and inter-service visits can be carried out without any issues of confidentiality among facilities. It also is useful for learning the method. For external benchmarking of clinical practices, it is difficult, given the medical specificity of the indicators to be used, to see how these practices might be compared against other sectors.

For non-clinical processes billing, inventory management, traceability of products used and so on , comparison with other sectors is possible. Thus, comparisons with sectors in which traceability is crucial, such as the pharmaceutical industry or any other sectors with strong quality assurance, could be worthwhile Gift and Mosel The healthcare system performance improvement movement of the early s saw the emergence of several national and international projects to develop indicators and evaluate performance Wait and Nolte Deliberations about the value of measuring these indicators led to the first initiatives of comparison in the healthcare sector.

Thus began the development of indicator-based comparative evaluation of hospital performance. The aims of the PATH Performance Assessment Tool for Quality Improvement in Hospitals project designed by WHO were to evaluate and compare hospitals' performance at the international level using an innovative multidimensional approach, to promote voluntary inter-organization benchmarking projects and to encourage hospitals' sustained commitment to quality improvement processes Groene et al. Its long-term objective was to create a set of indicators that could be used to identify new avenues of research on healthcare quality in OECD countries.

These indicators would essentially serve as the starting point for understanding why there were differences and what means could be used to reduce them and improve healthcare in all the countries Arah et al. There were also other international projects based on comparison of performance indicators.

One of these, for example, was a project in the Nordic countries on healthcare quality indicators. The aim of this project of the Nordic Council of Ministers was to describe and analyze the quality of services for major illnesses in the Nordic countries Denmark, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden Mainz et al.

In the United States, since the s, the AHRQ Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality has been developing and expanding a series of indicators, or QIs quality indicators , using a conceptual model with four dimensions to measure the quality, safety, effectiveness and efficiency of services provided both within and outside hospitals. These indicators are produced using only hospitals' clinical and administrative data AHRQ , Several other studies have targeted the comparison of healthcare indicators in a given area.

For example, Earle and colleagues compared the intensity of end-of-life care for patients with cancer by using Medicare administrative data. Two other studies, one American and the other Australian, looked at comparative analyses of mental health indicators among several healthcare organizations Hermann et al.

Other local and regional comparative indicator-based initiatives were developed in France:. These projects made it possible to develop indicators and to begin doing comparisons in the healthcare sector. In Denmark, the national indicator development project was created in Between and , several professional clinicians appointed by scientific societies developed evidence-based quality indicators for the management of illnesses.

The objective of this project was to document and develop quality of care for the benefit of the patient. Another aim of this project was to conduct benchmarking processes through regular dialogue between the agency collecting the indicators and the representatives of a region's institutions about the results of the indicators, as well as structured dialogues with institutions whose results were atypical.

This approach fits within a framework that is midway between internal improvement and external monitoring, in the sense that the agency would conduct a visit if this dialogue did not produce satisfactory explanations Mainz et al. It is based on indicators indicators in 26 healthcare domains in Hospitals receive their own results as well as those of the other hospitals.

Hospitals whose results are in the reference panel carry out, as part of the structured dialogue, an analysis of atypical results outliers , as in Denmark, but in addition, there are discussions between professionals in the different healthcare institutions to identify the reasons for the performance disparities.

The results for several specialties and the reasons for the differential evolutions between the regions are followed from year to year; finally, the indicators are analyzed and discussed from the methodological standpoint. In the United Kingdom, Essence of Care is an approach to healthcare services, launched in , that aims to improve the quality of the fundamental components of nursing care.

It uses clinical best practice evidence to structure a patient-centred approach to care and to inform clinical governance, a generic term designating the managerial policy of making care teams directly responsible for improving clinical performance. Benchmarking, as described in Essence of Care, helps practitioners adopt a structured approach to sharing and comparing practices so that they can identify best practices and develop action plans NHS , , ; Nursing Times Several publications dealt with this strategy and its application in various sectors of care.

Butler's article analyzed the political, professional, social and economic factors that contributed to the development of this approach, focusing particularly on benchmarks related to treating bedsores. It will be interesting to follow the European Union's EU initiative, which used a structured, seven-step benchmarking process as a new tool to evaluate national communicable disease surveillance systems in six member states in order to identify their strengths and weaknesses.

The objective was to make recommendations to decision-makers for improving the quality of these systems Reintjes et al. The aim of this project is to identify ways to promote strong linkages between quality measurement and a hospital's internal management. Coached by a team of advisers, hospitals learn how to analyze current emergency-room treatment processes and identify measures for improvement, as well as how to interpret outcomes by comparing them OFAS ; Schwappach et al.

The literature review highlighted how benchmarking approaches have evolved in the healthcare sector. This evolution produced numerous definitions, whose common theme is continuous measurement of one's own performance and comparison with best-performers to learn about the latest work methods and practices in other organizations.

We recommend adopting Ellis's definition, which clearly reflects the benchmarking process and offers the advantage of focusing particularly on the use of indicators and on the functions of learning and of sharing methods. Likewise, Pitarelli and Monnier put forward the key elements of a benchmarking process, i.

They represented large and small hospitals and health systems to make sure this program would meet the needs of a broad range of hospitals and health systems and provide you the information you need to make informed resource decisions. Participants can select from twenty quality and safety expense categories to report budget dollars and FTEs, and report on a centralized or decentralized budget basis.

The approach has been designed to ask the questions that matter most, make it easy to provide your data, compare yourself to peers of your choice and evaluate your resource allocation in a comprehensive way. Complete the online survey and receive a static PDF report including aggregated data, and budgeting and staffing averages and medians across the quality domains and functions included in the survey. Manually compare your numbers to the aggregated numbers in the PDF report. PDF above plus access to a dashboard that makes it easier to compare your data to the aggregated data, and budget and staff level averages and medians across the quality functions included in the survey.

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Identifying Indicators and Improving Benchmarking health and safety performance at work is vital to all organisations who want to excel beyond the threshold of legislative compliance.

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