Perceived barriers to receipt of quality-of-care data for monitoring and benchmarking by health service boards
| Perceived barriers | Quotes from interviews |
|---|---|
| Acceptability | “It's tough to find indicators that the medical staff will accept as meaningful.” (Medical director, rural) |
| Accuracy | “There are programs which can be easily manipulated … I think it's that old thing: rubbish in, you get rubbish out. So it's really reliant—still—back at the coal face, on reporting.” (Chief executive, rural) |
| Affordability | “There's quite a bit of criticism on how much money can be spent [on quality reports] and is it necessary.” (Chief executive, rural) |
| Comparability | “You need to ensure that apples are compared to apples because that's one of the biggest issues that we found when benchmarking projects [were] undertaken, that it's not necessarily always comparable.” (Quality committee chair, rural) |
| Completeness | “It comes back to those gaps in data and benchmarking … they are pretty well defined and available in the acute area, but I personally find aged care is a real vacuum. And in primary care, it's also hit and miss in terms of what data is around.” (Executive manager, rural) |
| Pertinence | “Major investigations in the health sector still come about through whistleblowers, not data.” (Chair, metropolitan) |
| Simplicity | “We actually had developed our own reporting system. Well, yeah, [the Department of Health] came in on top of that, and added what they called a minimum data set that had thousands of classifications and—you know—made our reporting system much more difficult.” (Risk manager, regional) |
| Sustainability | “The patient safety indicator programme looking for outliers in key areas—like complications post-surgery—was looking really good. But it's just disappeared. Gone, I'm sure.” (Executive manager, regional) |
| Timeliness | “We just keep hounding the Department of Health ‘til we get [benchmarking data] and it might take us six months to get the figures.” (Medical director, rural) |
| Validity | “Measuring outcomes is technically very difficult. It has to be unbiased, it has to be systematic, and it has to be risk-adjusted.” (Quality committee chair, metropolitan) |