New management system to enhance patient safety

11 March 2011

Victorian Health Services will be contributing to better outcomes for all patients with the new Victorian Health Incident Management System (VHIMS) now fully operational.

The new system will deliver greater quality and safety as well as a depth of reporting into incidents, which could potentially result in harm to patients.

The VHIMS is an important tool for collating, analysing and identifying trends and is a useful and important step forward in reporting errors and sentinel events. It provides a standardised data set and methodology for incident and consumer feedback management.

The VHIMS data set has been designed to enable the Department of Health to undertake statewide aggregation, data analysis and trend identification of multi-severity clinical incident data from across Victoria.

Health services will have the ability to undertake analysis and trending of their own incident data. They will also be able to reap the benefit of utilising a standardised methodology for recording the degree of impact for the person affected in an incident, whether they are a patient/client/resident or staff member, contractor or visitor.

Health services will have the ability to undertake analysis and trending of their own incident data and they will be able to reap the benefits of utilising a standardised methodology for recording the degree of harm for a person affected in an incident.

VHIMS data will provide the capacity for lessons learned within one organisation to be shared with others. A key component of VHIMS will be the delivery of effective information sharing mechanisms so that health services can benefit from analysis of statewide data.

Sources of VHIMS data collection include:

• all Victorian public health services
• 39 registered community health centres
• Ambulance Victoria
• Royal District Nursing Service
• Ballarat District Nursing and Healthcare
• 14 bush nursing centres
• Forensicare
• Five Incorporated Residential Aged Care Services.

These agencies are required to send de-identified clinical incident data to the Department of Health for aggregation and analysis.

Analysis of the statewide aggregate incident data will enable the department to better target future quality improvement and patient safety initiatives in Victorian publicly funded health services.

Find out more

Further information about the Victorian Health Incident Management System Project is available from the Clinical Risk Management website.