23 March 2023
The Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation (AusHSI) recently launched a practical new toolkit, Moving Towards High Value Care: Identifying and Addressing Low Value Care.
The Queensland researchers who lead the toolkit’s development, Professor Steven McPhail and Dr Zephanie Tyack, are passionate about empowering health professionals to deliver high value, patient-centred care. They believe the toolkit will help healthcare teams drive sustainable change across major public hospitals in Australia.
“Empowering our health services to deliver high value care and reduce activities that aren’t beneficial is an important priority. This helps health services to provide the best outcomes for patients with the available resources,” Professor McPhail said.
“It’s estimated that 10 to 30 percent of healthcare worldwide is wasteful, of little or no value, or harmful to patients.
“Using scarce resources to deliver care that doesn’t help people is wasteful. Those resources could be allocated to other treatments with greater benefit.
“Ultimately, we hope healthcare teams will use this toolkit to help provide the best possible care for their patients while minimising non-beneficial care.
“We know from the many interviews with hospital staff and other stakeholders during the toolkit development that Australian health professionals want to provide great care, but healthcare systems are complex, and there are day-to-day barriers that can make this challenging,” Professor McPhail said.
Why a toolkit?
Through its research, the team identified that health professionals needed a resource that was evidence-based, practical and adaptable to a range of healthcare settings and contexts.
“The project team could see many benefits in developing a comprehensive, user-friendly guide – from improving patient health outcomes to reducing the stress, frustration and burnout experienced by health professionals, who are trying to improve care practices,” Professor McPhail said.
“We hope the toolkit will stimulate conversations between healthcare providers and patients that encourage high value care and ultimately help improve the sustainability of our healthcare system.”
Dr Zephanie Tyack said since launching the toolkit, teams have reported using the toolkit to identify low value care at their hospital and redesign their services.
Dr Tyack explained the toolkit includes practical resources like case studies, templates and checklists to assist healthcare teams to implement high value care practices.“These are resources that health professionals told us they needed," she said.
“The toolkit is designed to be flexible and adaptable, allowing healthcare teams to choose the most appropriate strategies for their particular setting.”
Next steps
From here, the project team would like to engage with healthcare organisations eager to implement and evaluate the toolkit to reduce non-beneficial care and move toward high value care.
The team will distribute copies of the toolkit to healthcare organisations in the coming weeks. They also plan to hold workshops during 2023 to introduce the resources to health teams.
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The Moving Towards High Value Care toolkit was funded as part of a Health Translation Queensland initiative and developed by the Australian Centre for Health Services Innovation (AusHSI) in collaboration with clinicians, researchers and healthcare leaders.
For more information, please email Professor Steven McPhail or Dr Zephanie Tyack.
The project investigators:
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