Accelerating Excellence

NEW! Healthcare Quarterly series on Accelerating Excellence in Saskatchewan

Article 1 explores the initiative's beginnings - with a focus on efforts to engage Saskatchewan's healthcare leaders in making a better, safer system. (February 1, 2010)

Article 2 looks at how Releasing Time to CareTM is giving nurses the tools to do their job differently, and helping leaders learn how to lead in new ways. (April 2, 2010)

Article 3 features Saskatchewan physicians involved in quality improvement efforts and looks at strategies for engaging more physicians to improve quality. (June 1, 2010)

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A "perfect storm" is upon us in Saskatchewan's health care system. We're investing an ever-increasing amount of the provincial budget in health care, but gaps in quality persist. Our population is aging, with increased and complex health needs. The province also has a growing Aboriginal population disproportionately affected by chronic diseases. And our health care workforce is ageing, and feeling overworked and discouraged, which makes retaining and recruiting providers extremely challenging.

The good news is that other health systems around the world have, in the face of similar challenges, reinvented themselves. Through concentrated efforts, systems in the US, Sweden, and England have improved patient outcomes and patient and provider satisfaction - while holding the line on or reducing spending.

Accelerating Excellence is a made-in-Saskatchewan approach to applying the key lessons learned from other high-performing health systems. It is about giving people working at all levels in our health system - governors, managers, front line providers, and staff - the knowledge and tools to overhaul our system's current piecemeal collection of disparate parts into a coordinated, quality focused system.

In comparing Saskatchewan's health care system to high-performing systems elsewhere in Canada and around the world, we identified key challenges that HQC is addressing as part of the new Accelerating Excellence initiative:

• Leadership Improvement Capability: Quality as a Business Strategy is a program designed to help senior managers and board members integrate quality into their health delivery organizations.

• Organization-Wide Improvement Capability: We are helping build this capacity through our Quality Improvement Consultant program, Clinical Practice Redesign school, Teams and Leaders in Quality Improvement Training, and Lean)

• Clinician Engagement: We are working to foster clinician engagement through a new program called Releasing Time to Care; a growing network of physicians involved in QI; and the second Chronic Disease Management Collaborative, this one focused on COPD and depression);

• Measurement Infrastructure: We are addressing measurement infrastructure through our new Quality Insight measuring and reporting program.