The Challenge
NSW Health staff are required to report all incidents, near misses and consumer feedback into an incident management system. Historically, not all NSW Health agencies had access to the original incident information management system (IIMS) and paper-based reporting was routinely used.
Having disparate incident notification processes confused staff, meaning notifications could be a lengthy process and limited statewide reporting. This in turn reduced NSW Health’s ability to use the data captured to improve clinical care, staff safety and wellbeing.
eHealth NSW and the Clinical Excellence Commission (CEC) partnered together to address these concerns.
The Plan
ims+ needed to provide statewide data and analytics to continuously improve health and safety policies and processes. It also needed to provide a simple, user-friendly way for consumers to provide feedback on the healthcare they received.
ims+ was piloted in 2019 with Murrumbidgee and Western Sydney local health districts before being rolled out across the state in nine tranches. eHealth NSW partnered closely with each NSW Health organisation providing training, change management and communication support to help local staff transition across to the new system.
A co-existence strategy was required for managing the transition from IIMS to ims+, because incidents can be raised by one health entity for or about another health entity. Where during implementation those two entities were on different systems, incidents had to be transferred between IIMS and ims+.
The Outcome
ims+ is now live across the NSW Health network. ims+ captures all reporting for patient/clinical, work health and safety and corporate incidents. It also captures consumer feedback on how well their incident was managed. ims+ replaces the existing incident information management system (IIMS) and paper-based reporting. It is used by all 170,000+ NSW Health staff.
The Benefits
- One system for notifying incidents across both clinical and corporate environments
- Quicker, easier and reduces the time it takes for staff to record quality incident information
- Enables staff notifying incidents to track their resolution in real-time
- Enables staff notifying incidents to get updates on how they are resolved
- Automatically generates severity/harm rating of incidents
- Provides a way for consumers to provide feedback on how their incident was managed
- Improves clinical care, staff safety and wellbeing through improved statewide data
- Establishes foundations for potentially predicting and minimising incidents in the future.