HUS year 2022: Quality and patient safety

By law, every health care organization must have a plan for the implementation of quality management and patient safety. In public health care, a quality and patient safety plan (LAAPO plan) is also the organization’s self-monitoring plan.  

Patient safety is a component of quality, but because of its importance we wanted to include it specifically in the title of the HUS Quality and Patient Safety Plan.  

Active quality control 

Our cooperation with the JCI quality system ended in 2022, and we conducted an investigation of health care quality systems that might potentially be suitable for us.  

Preparing for the national health and social services reform tied up much of our development resources. In late autumn 2022, we began preparing a HUS-wide quality manual, which will lay the groundwork for our future quality system and provide a framework for internal audits.  

As the coronavirus pandemic receded, we reinstituted our internal quality observation rounds. We have trained HUS employees as observers to conduct these rounds. The purpose of observation rounds is to work with personnel in each unit to find ways to improve quality.

Aiming to provide access to parts of the Guideline Databank to primary health care 

In the Guideline Databank project, our focus was on transferring care and patient guidelines to the Databank.  We have been working with primary health care to explore possibilities to allow primary health care operators access to relevant HUS guidelines in the Guideline Databank.  

Read more about the Guideline Databank:
One-stop shop for care and patient guidelines  

Safety event reports for improving operations 

Patient safety relies on continuous improvement, maintenance of patient safety, reporting of safety events (HaiPro) and orientation and training for employees. The goal is to minimize preventable adverse impacts of care. Patients can also file safety event reports.  

Read more about the benefits of safety event reports:
Reporting safety events can improve your own work 

PosiPro for learning best practices  

To balance this, we use the Learning from Excellence (LfE) method. Its purpose is to identify and concretely display current best practices and procedures which are learning opportunities and which could be adopted more widely.  

We tested the PosiPro system based on the LfE concept in late 2022 and will be adopting it in spring 2023. 

In spring 2022, the Ministry of Social Affairs and Health published the national Client and Patient Safety Strategy and its Implementation Plan 2022–2026 (opens in new window, links to an external website), which will play a major role in our patient safety work. The purpose of this strategy is to harmonize quality and patient safety work nationally.