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Quality above all

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To ensure that patient outcomes are at all times satisfactory and in line with international standards, a clinical information division was formed by Mediclinic some 10 years ago.

“With patients who have more and more access to information and tend to share their hospital experiences, the hospital environment is moving increasingly to satisfactory patient outcomes and long-term follow-ups,” Mediclinic’s Dr Edwin Hertzog explains.

With this aim in mind, Mediclinic’s clinical information division, under the guidance of Dr Ronnie van der Merwe, started collecting statistics on, among other things, incidents of infection, as well as monitoring and making national and international comparisons of undesirable incidents, such as patients falling out of bed or stumbling in the passage and being injured.

In the process, more information about individual practitioners’ performances and operational outcomes is, of course, also obtained. In cases where these are not in line with accepted standards, the situation is brought to the attention of the practitioner concerned, and, as far as possible, support is provided to try to correct it.

In most cases, the desired results are obtained, but there have been instances where irreconcilable differences resulted in the leases of medical practitioners’ rooms at Mediclinic hospitals not being renewed.

In about five centres, it even led to the services of a few top specialists being terminated, “because if there isn’t good co-operation and a healthy working relationship, it spoils the whole atmosphere and team spirit of a hospital,” Hertzog explains.

“It’s not only a financial loss for us if a doctor leaves, but also a loss of expertise. Besides, the hospital industry is highly competitive, especially in the larger metropolitan areas, where the opposition usually benefits from such a situation. But, the positive side of it is that staff, especially nursing staff, see that the hospital is putting the patients and their interests first. In the end, this also means better patients outcomes for the group,” he emphasises. 
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