Feb 15, 2023
Over the past year, the province’s Health Quality Council (HQC) continued to build improvement capability and spread innovation throughout the province through education, analytic and evaluation support, and research.
HQC’s 2018-19 annual report, tabled in the provincial Legislature today, highlights work that HQC led, collaborated in, or supported to accelerate improvement in the quality of health and health care in Saskatchewan. The report succinctly explains what we do and why and the impact our work is having in Saskatchewan.
Dr. Dennis Kendel, Interim Chief Executive Officer, said that over the past year the Council’s focus has on broadening the future direction of HQC’s work. “While we are devoting considerable time and energy to new focus areas, we remain deeply dedicated to working collaboratively with our health system partners to continually improve health care province-wide,” said Dr. Kendel. “We are committed to being continually sensitive and responsive to the needs of our system partners.”
Work highlighted in the 2018-19 annual report includes:
- Ensuring patients get appropriate care (Appropriateness of Care): collaborated with the Saskatchewan Health Authority (SHA) to develop a process for identifying high-cost, high variation in health service use. (Page 27)
- Engaging patients and families as partners (Patient-and Family-Centered Care): HQC and the SHA hosted two screenings of the film Falling through the Cracks: The Greg Price Story to foster dialogue and highlight lessons for Saskatchewan’s health care system. (Page 29)
- Measuring how our health system is doing (Health System Measurement and Reporting): HQC led a group of family physicians in developing Primary Care Panel Reports. The reports were made available starting June 2019 to Saskatchewan family physicians that would like to request them. (Page 31)
- Building improvement capability (Provincial Integrated Learning System): Twenty-one Saskatchewan clinicians from Cohort 2 successfully completed the Clinical Quality Improvement Program (CQIP) last year, and another 25 clinicians began Cohort 3. (Page 33)
- Collaborating with research partners (Research Partnerships): HQC published six research papers that helped advance our collective understanding about specific health conditions. (Page 35)
“It is through collaboration that we are able to play off of each other’s strengths to support the health care system to continually make health care better and safer for the residents of Saskatchewan,” says HQC Board Chair, Dr. Susan Shaw. “As we step forward into new work including addressing the social determinants of health and our other strategic focus areas, I know there is no limit to what we can achieve and the lives we will touch in making both health and health care better for everyone in this province we call home.”
Click here read HQC’s 2018-19 Annual Report.
HQC’s mission is to accelerate improvement in the quality of health and health care in Saskatchewan. We fulfill that aim through four strategies:
- Integrate patients and families as partners in all aspects of health care;
- Build learning systems to spread knowledge on improving health care quality and safety;
- Measure health care outcomes and processes to generate evidence for decision making; and,
- Drive improvements in health care quality and safety by spreading best practices, ideas, and innovations.
