Best Care...Always! campaign

We strive for a quality management system that is both sustainable and consistent across all Life hospitals, and we are developing group-wide systems that measure performance against the individual goals of the hospital and against other hospitals in the group. Our systems are internationally benchmarked and improvement goals are set as required.

In addressing the challenges in healthcare delivery, Life Healthcare is expanding its quality improvement role to the whole industry, including the national Department of Health. We have been a key player in initiating the industry-wide Best Care…Always! campaign. Through the Hospital Association of South Africa (HASA) we have participated in the development of the revised core standards for health institutions that will soon be published. We are actively developing solutions to healthcare delivery in partnership with all roleplayers, as well as implementing the agreed initiatives and measurements across Life hospitals.

We are continuously exploring ways in which to further enhance clinical excellence in our facilities. One such corporate focus area, which demonstrates our commitment to clinical excellence, is a programme to benchmark and align a number of key clinical practices in our Life hospitals against international best practice. Specific focus areas include ventilator associated pneumonia, central line related infections, surgical site infections, catheter related urinary tract infections, and the treatment of myocardial infarctions. Baselines, a standardised process for implementing and measuring results, as well as compliance targets at both hospital and group level have been established, and performance is reviewed regularly up to executive level.

Life Healthcare played a leading role in the health industry task team that launched the Best Care …Always! quality improvement campaign in August 2009. This collaborative initiative includes all major hospital groups, key funders, professional societies and industry stakeholders, and is aimed at accelerating the pace, quality and safety improvement initiatives in public and private sector hospitals in South Africa. The campaign is modelled on international benchmarks and focuses on infection prevention and antibiotic stewardship, with a commitment by the hospitals to defined quality interventions that prevent patient risk as a result of healthcare associated infections. We have recently added the Best Care ...Always! ‘preventing urinary tract infections’ module to our initiatives. Our group will also provide pilot hospitals for the antibiotic stewardship campaign, which has not been implemented in other international initiatives.

Ongoing clinical excellence is attained by measuring our performance against international best practices and enforcing compliance across all our hospitals. This has resulted in an overall decrease in patient safety incidents within our group.