Building trust
SO many of our decisions and expectations in life come down to trust.
Whether booking a flight, taking your car to a mechanic or making an appointment with a dentist, you are placing trust in the people performing the task or providing the service. You trust they are qualified to do the work and you trust the system to be inherently safe.
At Barwon Health, we have the responsibility to care for our community and we know we cannot do that without our community’s trust. This is one of the reasons why transparency and accountability are such an important part of our service. They build trust.
Every year, Barwon Health publishes safety and quality results, including where we performed well and where we can improve. For example, we publish quality measures in mental health, waiting times for the emergency department and rates of clinical incidents, including adverse events.
This information is sometimes discussed in the media and the wider community without sufficient consideration of the overall results and the reasons why we report them to the community.
We use extensive data and information to help us monitor our performance, as well as benchmark our results against peers across the state and beyond. Public reporting informs the community about our results and reassures the community that we have nothing to hide.
Organisations and businesses with a culture of covering up mistakes or “sweeping issues under the rug” risk loss of trust and can compromise quality and safety.
There are many examples across various industries where a lack of transparency goes hand-inhand with poor outcomes. Recently, we have seen instances where courageous whistleblowers or royal commissions had to shine a light on system failures before they were satisfactorily addressed.
The aviation industry is renowned for its safety. Despite the many things that could go wrong in air travel, we generally trust it is safe to fly because we know there are extremely robust safety systems in place.
Aviation has a deep culture of open and transparent reporting of incidents and near misses. In fact, there are penalties for failing to report incidents. The healthcare industry aspires to achieve a similar culture of transparency.
Barwon Health is a large organisation. Every year we provide care to almost half of the population of Greater Geelong — more than 150,000 separate interactions with people in the community. It is hard to imagine a situation in which an organisation such as Barwon Health could go a year without any incidents or near misses, but our mission is to work to truthfully record them, continually learn from them and work tirelessly to eliminate them.
We must acknowledge that even a single incident impacts on the individual patient or resident involved, as well as their families and the staff caring for them. When something goes wrong, people want to know what happened, what has been done to correct it and what good can come from the episode. People often derive a sense of closure from the knowledge that improvements will be made to ensure their experience will not happen to anyone else.
Healthcare providers are accountable to government and various regulators. More importantly, we remain accountable to the community we serve. By transparently reporting our annual data, we aim to demonstrate our commitment to safety and quality, and earn the trust of our community.
Dr John Reeves is Barwon Health’s chief medical officer.