Tasmanian Health Service Comprehensive Care Plan

The Rundown:

In 2017, the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (the Commission) developed a set of Standards aimed at protecting the public from harm and improving the quality of healthcare. As part of these standards, the Commission mandated that all Australian health service organisations develop and implement a Comprehensive Care Plan (CCP). A CCP is a single yet all-inclusive plan of care that is shared between all members of the multidisciplinary team (e.g., nursing, medicine, pharmacy, allied health, consumers) for the purpose of enhancing communication, collaboration, and coordination of patient care. A CCP must also consider the patient’s goals and apply appropriate screening and assessment tools to reduce the risk of harm during health care. Given the complexity of such a task, the Tasmanian Health Service (THS) sought Cortexia’s help in developing a paper-based CCP that not only meets the Commission’s Standards, but also aligns with human factors and usability principles in its design.

The Result:

Cortexia began with a thorough review of the Commission’s Standards, THS templates, existing forms, and data from different regions across the THS (including different sized hospitals, different processes, different forms, different team structures, etc.). This information was collated and used as a framework to facilitate workshops with various user groups from different disciplines (i.e., nursing, medicine, pharmacy, allied health, and consumer groups). The feedback and outcomes obtained from these workshops determined the content, order, and flow of the Cortexia designed CCP. Thorough literature reviews of human factors and usability principles in healthcare were used to inform the design of the CCP itself (e.g., layout, spacing, colouring). Following the development of a draft Cortexia CCP, it was disseminated to a large and diverse sample of hospital staff (N = 58). Several iterations of the CCP were then produced to address this user feedback.

With COVID-19 restrictions preventing face-to-face interactions and/or observations in hospital settings, Cortexia created a bespoke evaluation plan for the THS with specific recommendations on how to assess the tool’s utility, completeness, quality, accuracy, efficiency, and usability post-implementation. This plan defined key outcome measures and included recommended data sources, measurement tools, collection methods, timeframes, and ways to interpret data specific to the evaluation of the CCP. Initial results have proven to exceed expectations, with plans to share Cortexia's designed CCP with other Australian Health Partners.

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