Safer Care Victoria

In 2022-23, Safer Care Victoria worked with Albury Wodonga Health, Albury Wodonga Private Hospital and Insight Private Hospital to contact around 2,000 patients who had a colonoscopy performed in the region since 1 January 2018.

An investigation had found that some colonoscopies performed in the region were incomplete, which may have affected the accuracy of the resulting diagnoses.

Many affected patients underwent a repeat colonoscopy as a precautionary measure.

The Duty of candour is a new legislative requirement for Victorian health services, which came into effect on 30 November 2022.  

The Duty of candour builds on existing elements of open disclosure as outlined in the Australian Open Disclosure Framework and encourages open, honest communication when a patient has suffered a serious adverse patient safety event while receiving care.    

Healthcare patients and their families/carers who have been impacted by serious adverse patient safety events (SAPSE) are entitled to play a role in internal review processes that seek to understand how their harm occurred. By involving impacted consumers in adverse event reviews, a fuller understanding of contributing factors can be gained, which leads to more accurate and robust findings, and better system improvements. 

Resources

In partnership with health services and consumers, we have developed a set of resources that can be used during the review process.

Sometimes things go wrong in healthcare, which can result in a patient being harmed. In these cases it’s important for the health service to:

• understand what happened
• understand how it happened
• make recommendations to reduce the chance it will happen again.

Learning from these events is a powerful tool to prevent harm going forward.

This page provides information on Safer Care Victoria’s role and the actions health services take when things have gone seriously wrong with patient care.