How to make QA work in private practice
Mark Tuck
MB BS BMedSci(Hons) FANZCA
Anaesthetic Group Ballarat
Victoria
The Anaesthetic Group in Ballarat is a business and profesional partnership that has been in existence since 1966. The fact that we operate as a partnerhip allows us to do things which may be more complicated in other professional relationships, but not impossible.
Over the last few years we have developed an in house QA system that we believe can be reworked for use in any private anaesthetic practice that involves any number of consultant anaesthetists working in a cooperative professional enviroment.
The keystones for our system are our Risk Management Committee(RMC) and Practice Nurse(PN). The RMC looks at all complaints from patients, surgeons, hospitals and other parties. It decides which clinical and practice issues we need to be assessing. The presentation will fill out the roles of the RMC and our PN with respect to our quality assurance programme. In addition we will present a short summary of a number of the audits/projects that we have completed in the last few years.
In implementing our programme we have had to accept the fact that doing it properly costs money. It would be very easy to show a bottom line that demonstrates that our QA process costs every member of the Anaestheic group in Ballarat $ xxx.00. That would be pointless. The intangible gains we have all received as a result of the introduction of this programme are huge.
Our hope is that this presentation will engender debate on the day and reflection over time that results in this sort of QA process being adopted in every private anaesthetic practice. We hope to show that structure of your practice is not an impediment to the solutions we have developed.
Time of Presentation
1030
