Media Release

27 August 2007

Reports on DHB hospitals assist openness and learning

District Health Boards (DHB) and the public will have a clearer idea of the performance of hospitals around the country, and patient perceptions of hospital care, with the release of two new reports on hospital services.

The Hospital Benchmark Information (HBI) reports, produced quarterly by the Ministry of Health, track the performance of all public hospitals in New Zealand against a variety of key performance measures. The reports help hospitals to measure their performance against one another, and look for ways to improve.

The reports provide information on 15 different performance measures, with greater importance placed on those directly affecting patients. The measures include triage times (emergency department waiting times), patient satisfaction, average length of stay, acute readmissions, hospital acquired bloodstream infections and a number relating to organisational issues such as staff turnover and workplace injuries.

The latest reports, for July to September 2006 and October to December 2006, are the first to be published since a major review of the reporting format in 2005/2006. The performance measures used from July 2006 onwards have been extensively revised in co-operation with the health sector, and now provide a more patient-centred view of hospital performance and more accurate reporting of emergency department waiting times.

As might be expected, hospitals perform strongly in some areas, with room for improvement in others. New Zealand hospitals are doing well in rapidly treating life-threatening emergency cases, and in overall patient satisfaction. They are seeing improvements over time in measures of efficiency, such as the percentage of patients treated as daycases, and the percentage of patients who are admitted to hospital on the same day as their operation.

At the same time, other measures, such as the time taken to treat less serious emergency cases, require improvement and will continue to receive attention from DHBs in their quest for better performance. Many hospitals are working on innovative systems to improve their efficiency, quality of care, and the experience of the patient as they move from emergency care to wards and then into the community.

In the October to December quarter, all but four of the 20 measured DHBs met their target for treating Triage 1 patients in their emergency departments. Triage 1 is the most urgent category and has a benchmark that 100 % of patients should be seen immediately. Eight DHBs met or exceeded their target for Triage 2 patients. The benchmark for this category is that 80 per cent of patients should be seen within 10 minutes. Three DHBs met the target for treating 75 per cent of Triage 3 patients within the recommended 30 minutes.

Overall patient satisfaction was reported by 18 of the 21 DHBs, and ranged from 85.5% to 92.9%.

For a copy of the reports go to: http://www.moh.govt.nz/publications

ENDS

Lucy Taylor
Media Advisor
Ministry of Health
Ph: 04 496 2349
Mobile: 027 687 5642

• emergency departments around New Zealand saw 1,366 triage 1 patients in the three months to December 2006, of which 1,331 were seen immediately
• in the same period emergency departments saw 19,275 triage 3 patients, and treated 12,481 of these within 30 minutes
• in the three months to December 2006 the rate of daycase procedures, which measures the percentage of patients who have a scheduled operation without needing an overnight stay, was the highest ever at 52.0%
• over the three years to December 2006 the number of patients who had a scheduled operation on the same day they were admitted to hospital increased from 36.6% to 41.9%
• overall patient satisfaction is stable, with an increase over the three years to December 2006 from 87.7% to 88.6%
• patients expressed lowest satisfaction over the way information is shared with them, and most satisfaction about the respect with which they were treated, and satisfaction is higher for outpatients than inpatients
• the HBI reports provide a starting point for hospitals wishing to measure services against other providers, for learning and improvement
• The Ministry of Health acknowledges that a poor result for a HBI measure is not the same as poor performance, and HBI reports are not used in any reward or punishment system by the Ministry
• these two reports introduce an extensively revised suite of HBI performance measures; of the 15 measures, six are new, five amended, and only four unchanged
• the public are encouraged to direct questions about local results to their local DHB; it is best placed to provide the context for understanding performance