Many hands make light work – NSAP improvement lessons from the frontline

The National Standards Assessment Program (NSAP) commenced rollout in July 2009. Since then 135 specialist palliative care services have registered to participate. This represents almost 80% of specialist palliative care services in Australia. While the central component of NSAP is service level self assessment against the national palliative care standards the program also results in actionable improvement plans. Participating services submit a report of their assessment and improvement action plans to NSAP. Analysis of these de-identified reports provides access to detailed information on the quality challenges and improvement opportunities faced by services in all states and territories. To date more than 50 services have completed assessment and submitted reports. Collectively they have identified and prioritised almost 500 improvement actions. The reporting and analysis of this information forms part of the National Quality Report, an annual report generated by NSAP to inform national and regional improvement effort. Analysis of the improvement effort reveals that the improvement actions fall into a number of common areas, for example communication with families, improving access, sharing information, and improving outcomes of home deaths. Understanding our common challenges creates the potential to promote collaborative solutions development to support system-level improvement. This presentation will provide feedback on the challenges reported by clinical services striving to meet the national standards and outline the improvement work they are undertaking. Areas that would benefit from national improvement effort will be highlighted and discussed.

8459 - Many hands make light work - NSAP improvement lessons from the frontline (210kb pdf).