How do we know if our hospitals are safe?

Despite the release of adverse event statistics today by the Ministry of Health, it is still virtually impossible to get an accurate picture of the number of such incidents occurring in our hospitals, the Green Party says

“Unbelievably the entire adverse events reporting system is still voluntary, meaning that DHBs still do not have to disclose their adverse events or use a standard reporting system,” Health Spokesperson Sue Kedgley says.

“It’s up to each DHB to decide whether and what to report. For example Tairawhiti DHB seems not to have disclosed any of its adverse events.

“As well, the definitions used, the systems used and the reporting requirements all differ between the different DHBs, so it’s still impossible to make comparisons or get a true overall picture.”

It is not good enough that we still can not be sure how many New Zealanders have died as a result of mistakes being made in hospitals, she says.

Waikato DHB report 23 deaths where the ‘action or inaction of the DHB may have been a contributing factor’. Whereas across the country 40 deaths were associated with an ‘actual or potentially preventable clinical incident’. Are we comparing apples with apples? Does this mean there were more deaths in other hospitals that were not included because the reporting criteria differed?

It is hard to have confidence in the accuracy of the statistics released today, when they are different from those that the Capital and Coast DHB supplied to the Health Select Committee in the last few weeks, she says.

“What is going on here? Why is there such a huge variance in the figures? Are we being the whole story?

“We have absolutely no way of knowing how safe our hospitals are and how they compare to hospitals in other countries. The information released today does not contain even basic standardised data showing how many medication errors, infections and surgical deaths take place in our hospitals, or statistics to enable us to work out whether hospitals are getting better or worse.”

This is not about naming and shaming DHBs, it is an opportunity to shine a light on hospital safety and learn from our mistakes, Ms Kedgley says.