Hospital Benchmarking Reports released

The Ministry of Health has today released two reports looking at hospital services including emergency department waiting times and patient perceptions of hospital care.

The Hospital Benchmark Information (HBI) reports are produced quarterly by the Ministry of Health and track the performance of all public hospitals in New Zealand against 15 key performance measures. The reports help hospitals to measure their performance against one another, and look for ways to improve.

Among the performance measures are triage times (emergency department waiting times), patient satisfaction, average length of stay and acute readmissions.

Early indications of a small number of DHBs not meeting targets for triage 1 times were largely found to be related to difficulties with information systems.

The corrected data shows in the June quarter, 20 out of 21 DHBs met the target for treating Triage 1 patients in emergency departments. Triage 1 is the most urgent category and DHBs are expected to see 100 per cent of patients in this category immediately.

The one DHB that did not meet the Triage 1 target has assured the Ministry that all Triage 1 patients at its base hospital are seen and treated immediately. A newly introduced patient management IT system is being modified to provide more accurate data for reporting purposes in the future.

Eight DHBs met or exceeded the target for Triage 2 with 80 per cent of patients seen within 10 minutes. Five DHBs met the target for treating 75 per cent of Triage 3 patients within the recommended 30 minutes.

DHBs are working to improve their performance with hospitals developing innovative systems to improve their efficiency, quality of care, and the experience of the patient as they move from emergency care to other parts of the hospital and back in to the community.

The March 2007 and June 2007 reports are the first to record the number of Staphylococcus aureus bloodstream infections - instead of all bloodstream infections as was the case previously - against the number of bed days in hospital. The focus on S. aureus infections is because they are one cause of poor outcomes for patients, they usually result from healthcare procedures such as the insertion of catheters and the introduction of the infection through surgery, and they are potentially avoidable.

Initial figures show the national infection rates for the March 2007 and June 2007 quarter were 0.21 and 0.20 infections per 1000 bed days respectively. However, it is expected there will be a high degree of statistical variability in these figures over time, and so it is difficult to draw any conclusions about DHB performance at this early stage of data collection.

Nationwide overall patient satisfaction continues to remain high at 88 per cent.

For a copy of the reports go to: http://www.moh.govt.nz/moh.nsf/indexmh/dhb-hospital-benchmark