Peterborough Regional Health Centre’s commitment to improving quality and safety starts with our leadership. Leaders and staff work proactively to identify and achieve key objectives for quality and safety, such as reducing preventable deaths, infection rates and medication incidents, and improving wait times and patient satisfaction.
Our Board Quality of Care Committee regularly reviews the hospital’s progress on meeting these objectives, discusses how we are performing over time compared against industry standards and other hospitals, and how we might improve.
PRHC’s vision is to embed quality improvement into our culture, with staff and physicians focused on continuous improvement within the context of our overall quality framework: patient flow and access, patient safety and patient satisfaction.
Our legislated Quality Improvement Plan (QIP) is a subset of our broader corporate strategy for quality, and fulfills our obligations under the Excellent Care for All Act (ECFAA).
About the ECFAA and the QIP
The ECFAA’s goal is to make health care providers and leaders accountable for improving patient care and the patient experience.
The ECFAA requires that hospitals:
- Establish a Quality Committee of the Board
- Carry out Patient and Employee Satisfaction Surveys
- Have a Patient Relations Process and Patient Declaration of Values
- Comply with related amendments to the Public Hospitals’ Act, including Critical Incident reporting to the Medical Advisory Committee
- Develop and post a board-approved, annual Quality Improvement Plan
- Link Executive Compensation to the QIP
The Quality Improvement Plan (QIP):
- Must be developed by all hospitals in advance of every fiscal year, as mandated by the ECFAA
- Is part of PRHC’s overall comprehensive quality strategy, and is directly linked to our strategic direction of "High-Quality Patient Care"
- Is not new for PRHC. What is new is putting the indicators and targets into a standardized, provincial template and having hospital executives’ compensation linked to achievement of specific QIP targets
Indicators and targets for the QIP effective April 1, 2012 include: reduction of COPD readmission rates, reduction of Emergency (ED) wait times, reduction of Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAIs), decreased patient falls, maintenance of current Hospital Standardized Mortality Rate (HSMR), and improvement in ED patient satisfaction scores.
PRHC's Quality Improvement Plan was approved by the Board of Directors on March 29, 2012.
Quality Improvement Plan (QIP)
QIP Part B: Improvement Targets and Initiatives