Clinical governance: efficacy of establishment in Mashhad hospital

Clinical governance is a framework in which the organizations providing clinical services are responsible in exchange for the permanent improvement of quality and preserving the service's high standard. It relies on the responsibility to maintain current levels of care and on clinical governance pillars to improve the quality of future care. Also, it is a concept that attempts to integrate the previous methods and tools in measuring and improving quality of care. This descriptive-analytic-interventional study was conducted to evaluate the hospitals of Mashhad before and after the establishment of clinical governance in 2011. Data were collected by both questionnaires and observation. Comparing the range of clinical governance's pillars obtained, from the selected hospitals, showed a significant improvement in all studied axes following the establishment of clinical governance. The highest effectiveness was related to clinical audit, staff management and training axes, whereas the least effective part was the interaction with patients, their relatives and the community. Regarding the significant difference in the obtained results after the establishment of clinical governance in this study, it could be concluded that the establishment of clinical governance and its performance could remarkably improve the quality of health services.

The survey of patient safety culture and recognizing its weaknesses and strengths in Sabzevar hospitals: 2011

Objectives: improving patient safety culture in healthcare organization is the first step for reducing medical errors and improvement of patient safety. This study was conducted to survey the patient safety culture based on staff point of views in Sabzevar hospitals

Methods: This cross-sectional and descriptive study was conducted during July- September 2011, by using Hospital Survey Of Patient Safety Culture questionnaire [HSOPSC]. 385 of clinical staff [physicians, nurses, midwives and stuff working in lab and radiology departments] as census were included in the study. The patient safety culture questionnaire was used for data collection

Results: [teamwork within unit] and [organizational learning continuous improvement] had the highest percentages of positive responses with respectively 73.65 +/- 6.4 % and 69.16 +/- 8.7 % whereas "nonpunitive response" to errors [13.03 +/- 7.1%] and [staffing] [22.37 +/- 6%] had the chosen lowest percentages of positive responses. 89% of staff noted that they have not reported any medical errors during past 12 months. Only 31% of staff reported the patient safety status in their units as excellent or very good

Conclusion: Hospitals can attempt to create safety environment for patients by applying the strengths of their patient safety culture and removing the weaknesses. Therefore hospitals should eliminate the staff fear of blame for their mistakes and create an atmosphere of open communications and continuous learning