St Vincent's digital solution to improve risk management

St Vincent’s Health Australia’s Manager of Clinical Governance & Assurance, Edel Murray, reflects on the organisation’s new initiative to reduce risks and improve safety.

At St Vincent’s Health Australia (SVHA), we constantly strive for safer, more effective measures to reduce vulnerability and risks across the organisation. That’s why it was imperative that we empowered our staff to contribute to a broader risk management solution, creating safer environments for patients, clients, colleagues and residents.

RiskMan to the rescue

We had five distinctive, divisional applications to manage incidents, feedback, hazards, quality and risk, and our aim was to consolidate and standardise these into one enterprise digital solution. This was when ‘SVHA RiskMan’ was born. Supported by a robust governance methodology back in August 2020, the initiative was segmented into four distinct stages: Standardisation, Consolidation, Implementation and Transition to Business As Usual (BAU).

A key success factor for the project was stakeholder engagement. The project team led 13 working groups to map current and future state processes. Within these working groups, over 270 subject matter experts participated in virtual meetings, creating one dataset to meet best practice guidelines, legislative compliance and the needs of acute, sub-acute and aged care reporting. As the first SVHA enterprise-wide solution, many specialities were brought together, establishing a number of communities of practice.

Data standardisation for informed decision-making

To consolidate the technical design — building, testing, integration and migration came next, bringing RiskMan to fruition. This platform became the first enterprise cloud-based solution at St Vincent’s, using support from our RiskMan application vendor RLDatix, business partner NTT, and our Digital and Technology teams. Pursuing an agile, innovative culture that embraced change meant the implementation could move to a division-based approach and meet new and emerging issues, including COVID-19 outbreak responses and challenges. This large-scale engagement with the business accelerated our implementation of RiskMan and transition to BAU.

The standardisation of our RiskMan data has enabled our teams to make just and informed decisions, influencing our continuous improvement cycles. In the last six months alone, we have managed over 36,000 events (incorporating incidents, hazards and general feedback), allowing the clinical governance teams to analyse consistent themes across our sites.

Supporting the community

This project has united 23,000 staff members, building organisational integrity, while advancing our St Vincent’s healing ministry. RiskMan gives the staff a voice to safely support our wider community from harm, both now and into the future.

In exciting news, St Vincent’s will be presenting the RiskMan application implementation at the International Society for Quality in Healthcare in Brisbane this year. To be held from 17–20 October 2022, the ISQua brings together over 1500 key decision-makers from over 80 countries to share their expertise and knowledge in health care quality and safety improvement.

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