Infection is risk - control is management

Post Bundaberg HQCC was established in July 2006 and by July 2007 seven Standards were implemented. Within six months 226 hospitals in Queensland were reporting their compliance with processes in hand hygiene and infection surveillance. With three rounds of reporting complete, the compliance for documented processes has lifted from 97% to !00% and for compliance with alignment with the HQCC standard has lifted from 88% to 100%. The positive change in process compliance is encouraging, however HQCC is now focussing on the profile of information that it has in each hospital, including the standard compliance, complaint issue data and RCA recommendations to form a risk profile of each hospital. To encourage quality improvement the regulator will ask facilities to verify the profile and then HQCC will use a responsive regulation approach to respond. Most facilities will manage their risk and move quickly to compliance and quality improvement. Some will require audit and facilitated improvement strategies to be shared and very few facilities may pose high risk requiring immediate intervention for safety improvement.

HQCC is also about quality and safety and we are using risk to identify the problems early. Information is a risk and control is good management. Having HQCC encouraging facilities to measure and control the risk early will act as a fence at the top of the cliff rather than a hearse at the bottom of the cliff.

Using risk profiling HQCC should be able to pick another Bundaberg before it happens.