Strengthening Medical Safety with Continuous Quality Improvement
"Medical safety is the bottom line of hospital work and healthcare quality is the lifeline for hospital development. Every hospital should put the continuous improvement of healthcare quality in the first place."
LEI Guanghua, President, Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Hunan
"Strengthening Medical Safety with Continuous Quality Improvement"
Medical Quality is the Lifeline for a Hospital
For a hospital, once the medical quality fails, there will be safety hazards and patients will no longer trust it. Therefore, medical quality of a hospital is extremely important, and it is the lifeline for the hospital and an eternal theme for hospital management. President Lei Guanghua said that Xiangya Hospital has been continuously improving and optimizing its healthcare quality and system. They have introduced the reporting system for adverse events. They encourage medical staff to report adverse events on their own initiative, and especially reward the behavior of reporting hidden medical safety hazards and problems of the medical management system. People who initiatively report the adverse event in which they are involved in will receive lenient punishment. The implementation of this rule minimizes the possibility of potential safety hazards evolving into adverse events.
“The fundamental goal of reporting adverse medical events is to ensure patients’ safety, not to punish the person concerned”, President Lei Guanghua introduced.
It is a part of our culture to encourage medical staff to report medical adverse events initiatively as it could lead them to actively think about how to ensure patients’ safety. In addition, through analyzing the adverse events, we can find out the shortcomings in our work and then constantly learn from those events. Therefore, we can avoid the recurrence of similar incidents and make targeted and continuous improvement in hospital management system and rules and regulations.
Actively Explore High-Quality Healthcare Resources Distributed to Primary Units
President Lei Guanghua said, “If we hope the medical system reform in our country to succeed, I think the key point is the launching of hierarchical diagnosis system as well as enhancing doctors’ initiative.”
Xiangya Hospital has been exploring the two-way referral, hierarchical diagnosis , and the distribution of high-quality healthcare resources to primary units for many years. As early as 1996, Xiangya Hospital has established a telemedicine center, and begun to carry out distance consultation and distance training for primary hospitals and medical institutions in remote areas.
In 2008, Xiangya Hospital began to establish two-way referral guiding hospital in Hunan Province. President Lei Guanghua emphasized, "we are promoting two-way referral, not only suggesting patients to get referred to urban hospitals, but also actively referring suitable patients to primary hospitals."
In conclusion, Xiangya Hospital hopes to guide primary hospitals and promote their healthcare quality and services via the construction of the healthcare system. Therefore, the public could go to the primary hospitals for their first visit and the real grading diagnosis and treatment could be realized.
Carry out “Famous Doctors at Xiangya” Project
As we know, Xiangya Hospital is one of the main origins of western medicine in China. Having gone through the development of a hundred years, it has formed the well-known brand “Xiangya”. The launching and promotion of the project "Famous Doctors at Xiangya" at Central South University has brought new power to the a-hundred-year developed brand “Xiangya”. For the experts who have been entitled as "Famous Doctors at Xiangya", the university would provide special funds for their scientific researches, talents training, team building and so on.
A hospital without a famous doctor is like a university without a famous teacher, which could not have strong influence and cohesion. At present, there are not many clinical doctors engaged in scientific research in hospitals, and there is also a phenomenon of disconnection between basic research and clinical practice. "If a doctor does not do any research at all, it will be difficult for him to really improve. If a study is not combined with clinical practice, its significance should be discussed.” President Lei Guanghua said.
