Business
Ensuring our patients’ safety is of such importance to Mediclinic Southern Africa, we’ve introduced Patient Safety Managers at our hospitals.
‘At Mediclinic, everything we do centres around the patient,’ says Koert Pretorius, CEO of Mediclinic Southern Africa. ‘Our brand promise is “Expertise you can trust” and at the heart of this is preventing harm to our patients whilst they are in our care.”
Mediclinic is committed to delivering on this brand promise in our 52 hospitals in Southern Africa and we’re proud of the reputation we’ve built for excellence. But working in a complex, often stressful environment, means that sometimes human error creeps in or systems fail. That is why Mediclinic Southern Africa has a post in each hospital – that of the Patient Safety Manager.
Patient-safety related events include adverse events and the Patient Safety Manager will be in charge of investigating near misses or negative clinical outcomes in the hospital.
‘We have the clinical skills and expertise to investigate errors,’ says Dr Stefan Smuts, Chief Clinical Officer for Mediclinic. ‘These investigations help us to understand why errors occurred and to develop action plans on how to prevent them occurring. Learning from errors and near misses is vital in establishing a patient safety culture in which we improve the healthcare system continuously.’
To achieve these improvements, we use Quality Improvement science. This employs scientific methods to understand issues in a health care system and finds ways to resolve them. Ansie Prinsloo, Mediclinic’s Corporate Patient Safety Officer, says that the Patient Safety Managers are key to creating the required traction around patient safety. They are being capacitated with quality improvement capability to co-create improved safety behaviours alongside the nursing and pharmacy leaders and frontline.
‘No individual or unit can guarantee patient safety on their own,’ stresses Chief Operating Officer Wimpie Aucamp. ‘In order for us to prevent patients from being harmed we need a collaborative effort between doctors, staff members as well as allied healthcare workers.’
The clinical teams that work alongside the Patient Safety Managers therefore include as many people as possible who are directly involved in delivering patient care as they have first-hand experience of where the system breaks down, putting patients at risk of harm.
As Dr Ronnie van der Merwe, International Chief Clinical Officer for Mediclinic, says, ‘For all the many things we do in this large organisation, the most important is ensuring safe patient care. Patient safety is the first building block towards high quality care and a sustainable, successful hospital business like ours.’