Australia’s most authoritative healthcare services report published

A new data report shows that Australian healthcare services continue to improve across a range of clinical areas – however distinct deteriorations in clinical indicators speak to broader issues.

The latest healthcare trends across 20 sets of key clinical indicators have been reported in the new Australasian Clinical Indicator Report 2011 – 2018 (20^th edition), or ‘the ACIR’ published by the Australian Council on Healthcare Standards (ACHS).

As Australia’s most statistically-detailed, national report on the performance of 656 healthcare organisations (HCOs) the ACIR covers an eight-year period and gives a comprehensive statistical overview of the results for each clinical indicator (CI) set. This assists healthcare services to understand their own level of performance within a national context.

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Key improvements reported include:

In 2018, there were 104 CIs (a 20% increase) which showed statistically significant positive trends. There were eight CI sets that had an improvement in at least two-thirds of all trended CIs.

• They were; Anaesthesia and Perioperative Care, Day Patient, Emergency Medicine, Gynaecology, Infection Control, Intensive Care, Paediatrics and Rehabilitation Medicine.

Notable deteriorations where the potential to make improvements exist included:

In 2018, there were 40 CIs which showed statistically significant trends in a negative direction. Of these, 18 remained significant including:

• Gastrointestinal Endoscopy – the rate of patients transferred or admitted for an overnight stay due to aspiration has deteriorated from 0.022 to 0.035 per 100 patients since 2011.

• Maternity – the rate of selected primipara (women who give birth once) with intact perineum has decreased from 19.7 to 10.9 per 100 primipara.

• Mental Health – the rate of physical restraint has increased nearly threefold from 1.3 to 5.6, a change of 4.2 per 100 completed episodes.

ACHS President, Professor Len Notaras AM said that the value of the overall data increases each year. “We are fortunate to have this asset which builds a clear understanding of where clinical improvements as well as deteriorations are occurring.”

“It provides an immense opportunity for healthcare services to assess their own performance and compare how they are performing at a national level with their peers,” he said.

“There is no other comparable dataset in the world which has the statistical depth of more than a quarter of a century to it. ACHS continues to invest in the most authoritative report on performance achieved up to 2018 for the health services with nearly 29,000 data submissions.”

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