Connected Care strategy, Clinical Quality Improvement Program highlighted in Health Quality Council’s 2017-18 annual report

Over the past year, the province’s Health Quality Council (HQC) continued to build improvement capability and spread innovation throughout the province, through education, improvement initiatives, and research.

HQC’s 2017-18 annual report, tabled in the provincial Legislature today, highlights work that HQC led or supported to accelerate improvement in the quality of health and health care in Saskatchewan. We revamped the document, to more succinctly explain what we do and why, and the impact our work is having in Saskatchewan. This year’s report is more visual, to appeal to a broader audience, and clearly links our various programs with our strategic priorities.

Dr. Dennis Kendel, Interim Chief Executive Officer, said that over the past year the Council’s focus has been on helping the Saskatchewan health system become a more people-centred, learning health system. “This happens at many levels within the system, through our work with leaders and administrators, clinicians and other care providers, patients and family, and researchers,” said Dr. Kendel.

“We have grown their capabilities and connections, sparked new ideas and spread the good ones, and helped to establish tools and other supports needed by the people in Saskatchewan’s health system to accelerate improvement of care.”
(Dr. Dennis Kendel, Interim Chief Executive Officer)

Work highlighted in the 2017-18 annual report includes: 

• Reducing waits in Emergency and improving patient flow: HQC launched the new provincial Connected Care Strategy, which promises to reduce the health system’s historic reliance on hospital care, by meeting patients’ needs closer to home in the community.
• Ensuring patients get appropriate care: HQC took on provincial coordination of the now-global Choosing Wisely campaign to reduce unnecessary medical tests and treatment.
• Involving patients and families as partners: The Council helped our partners more effectively engage patients and families in 25+ quality improvement events and research projects.
• Measuring how our health system is doing: HQC led development of surveys to gather input from patients receiving care in hospital and the community, and though mental health and addiction outpatient setting.
• Building improvement capability: Fourteen physicians from around the province successfully completed the new Clinical Quality Improvement Program last year, and another 22 clinicians began the second wave of this training program.
• Collaborating with research partners: HQC published eight research papers that helped advance our collective understanding about specific health conditions.

“Over the last 15 years, HQC has worked alongside its health care partners, helping set the foundation for each subsequent step forward as a system,” says HQC Board Chair, Dr. Susan Shaw. “The work we’ve done and the work we’ll continue to do, embody our commitment to supporting the system to achieve its full potential as a high-performing health care system.”

Click here to view a copy of HQC’s 2017-18 Annual Report

HQC’s mission is to accelerate improvement in the quality of health and health care in Saskatchewan. We fulfill that aim through four strategies: Integrate patients and families as partners in all aspects of health care; Build learning systems to spread knowledge on improving health care quality and safety; Measure health care outcomes and processes to generate evidence for decision making; and, Drive improvements in health care quality and safety by spreading best practices, ideas, and innovations.