How are we tracking?
How are we tracking?
Monitoring and measuring performance against key clinical, strategic, quality and financial markers is an important part of managing and improving Waikato District Health Board. It is also important to do so in a transparent and publicly accountable way.
Performance reports, including operational, financial, quality, people/staff, infrastructure, funded/contracted providers, and information technology areas, are presented to Waikato DHB’s governance level on a regular basis.
Service user experience
What matters to you is important to us. Your feedback helps us improve our services. We use feedback forms, formal complaints, and surveys to listen to our service users, their families and carers.
Learning from adverse events
- Waikato DHB Learning from adverse events: latest report.
Patient Flow
When patients are referred to our hospitals for specialist services, the time it takes patients to get their first specialist assessment with the hospital consultant is measured by the Ministry of Health. How we are tracking compared to other DHBs is published here.
The Ministry of Health will also start collecting other similar data in future as part of this National Patient Flow project.
National Quality Dashboard
The Health Quality & Safety Commission has a publicly-available dashboard of health system quality that shows at a glance how individual district health boards are performing in a variety of areas. (Select Waikato DHB from the list of DHBs to see our results).
The dashboard takes information from a range of published sources, including the Commission’s quality and safety markers, the primary care and inpatient patient experience surveys, the Atlas of Healthcare Variation and data from the Ministry of Health, and puts it together in one place. A simple-to-read, interactive chart allows users to see the data.
National health targets
The Ministry of Health reports on quarterly progress towards achieving agreed annual health targets with each district health board. Note: The Government has directed the Ministry of Health to develop a new set of performance measures to improve health outcomes for New Zealanders. While work is underway to develop these new measures DHBs will continue to report to the Ministry against the current set of health targets, as well as against a previously established suite of wider measures. How DHBs are performing is reported on a quarterly basis on the Ministry of Health website.
Certification and accreditation
All Waikato DHB hospitals and inpatient facilities are certified and audited to ensure we provide safe, appropriate care for our patients and meet the standards set out in the Health and Disability Services (Safety) Act 2001. These standards are outlined in NZS8134:2008 Health and Disability Services Standards.
As a legislative requirement our hospitals and facilities must:
- be certified by the director-general of health to provide the health care services
- meet all relevant service standards
- be in compliance with the Act.
A certification audit is undertaken every three years to assess whether we are meeting the health and disability service standards.
A surveillance audit is undertaken part-way through our period of certification to assure the Ministry of Health that we continue to meet all relevant standards.
The most recent audit was a four-day certification audit of inpatient services in March 2019, against the Health and Disability Services Standards, included a review of management, quality and risk management systems, training and staffing requirements, service delivery from admission to discharge, infection prevention and control, restraint minimisation and the environment.
- A summary of this report, and previous audits, is available here
Waikato Health System Plan
We are developing an action plan for the next 10 years to ensure we deliver on our vision and strategic imperatives. The plan is for a health system where people are empowered to live healthy lives and to stay well, with quality, safe, efficient and effective services delivered around the needs of people. Our Waikato Health System Plan will help us do this by giving a ‘whole of system view’ not just focused on the DHB. It will be informed by DHB and non-DHB stakeholders and it will be developed with input from the community and other health providers. The proposed timing of the plan's development, including consultation, is during the second half of 2018.
Waikato DHB Maternity Annual Report
Waikato DHB publishes a Maternity Annual Report, coordinated by Ruth Galvin, manager of its Maternity Quality and Safety Programme (MQSP), to outline to the Ministry of Health and to other stakeholders (including consumers of Waikato maternity services) its progress in MQSC during that year. The purpose of the report is
- to give an overview of maternity services in Waikato.
- outline quality and safety improvements made in that year
- describe Waikato DHB's plans to improve the quality and safety of its maternity services in the coming year.