QI Awards 2023: Get Inspired by last year’s winning submission
We caught up with 2022 QI Award Winner of the Clinical Excellence and Patient Safety Category - Associate Professor Katie Wynne from Hunter New England Health District’s (HNEHD).
The QI Awards submission by Hunter New England Health District’s (HNEHD) titled ‘Support Care: what matters most?’ focused on improving the experience of giving (clinicians) and receiving care (patients), and the intention of easing significant economic burden to the health system associated with high rates of unplanned clinical contact experience by people living with Advanced Liver Disease (ALD).
The Liver Life randomised controlled trial (RCT) aimed to examine how a transdisciplinary supportive approach to care, embedded within standard care, and guided by patient and carer expressed needs, could optimise health service performance and health outcomes for patients and carers living with ALD, as compared to standard care alone.
The Liver Life RCT was the first of its kind to demonstrate the clear benefit of a transdisciplinary supportive approach to care for ALD patients, examining the effectiveness of a Supportive Care Bundle (SCB) integrated within standard care for patients with ALD. Primary outcomes were measured against health service utilisation, and secondary outcome measures considered symptom burden, quality of life, carer burden, evidence of advance care planning, and an economic (cost-utility) analysis.
We recently got in touch with Associate Professor Katie Wynne, Senior Staff Specialist, Diabetes & Endocrinology, John Hunter Hospital to hear more about how her team’s QI initiative has been tracking since submission.
Updates and results on the project.
Our Liver Life project, provided a supportive care approach for people with advanced liver disease and optimised health service utilisation with a two thirds reduction in acute hospital presentations and participants five times more likely to experience days 'alive and out of hospital'.
Wonderful feedback was received from patients and their carers, reporting they were 'heard' and what really mattered most was their needs were prioritised, for example 'it wasn’t until supportive care that someone looked at the real issues' and they 'helped me, it was so personalised’.
Clinicians reported more confidence to undertake end-of-life discussions and valued an opportunity to shift their focus to what was most important to the patient and carer, noting that 'we’re giving patients permission to bring things to the table'.
Experience entering and winning the QI Awards in 2022.
The honour of winning the ACHS Quality Improvement Awards was an important part of the supportive care model becoming standard care at John Hunter Hospital and Tamworth Rural Referral Hospital in 2023.
How the Liver Life project and winning the QI Awards changed the way HNEHD operate.
Hunter New England has created a dedicated supportive care chronic disease team that are co-designing and implementing supportive care models starting with Aboriginal Health and Heart Failure services. People living with chronic disease will benefit from early supportive care that works.
Special thanks to Associate Professor Katie Wynne for providing updates and feedback on the winning project and being part of the QI Awards 2022.
Do you have a quality improvement project to showcase?
The QI Awards are an annual recognition of achievement and encouragement for quality improvement activities, programs or strategies that have been implemented into healthcare organisations. The Awards provide an opportunity to share patient-focused innovation and communicate their quality improvement achievements to the healthcare industry.
If you have implemented a quality improvement activity in the last two years you may be eligible to enter this years’ QI Awards.
Apply now and get national recognition for your improvement initiatives.
Submissions close on Friday, 8 September 2023 at 5pm (AEST).
