The state of quality improvement and patient safety teaching in health professional education in New Zealand.

Aim: To investigate how quality and patient safety domains are being taught in the pre-registration curricula of health profession education programmes in New Zealand.

Methods: All tertiary institutions providing training for medicine, nursing, midwifery, dentistry, pharmacy, physiotherapy, dietetics and 11 other allied health professions in New Zealand were contacted and a person with relevant curriculum knowledge was invited to participate. Interviews were conducted using a semi-structured interview guide to explore nine quality and safety domains; improvement science, patient safety, quality and safety culture, evidence-based practice, patient-centred care, teamwork and communication, leadership for change, systems thinking and use of information technology (IT).

The measurement of New Zealand health care.

The effective and economical measurement of the quality and safety of health and disability services in New Zealand is of signal importance. The Health Quality and Safety Commission has overseen the introduction of an architecture of interacting measures. These include quality and safety indicators, or QSIs, which are whole-system measures; quality and safety markers, or QSMs, which are targeted measures of quality and safety interventions comprising process and outcome measures in sets; and the New Zealand Atlas of Healthcare Variation, which illustrates the differences in the health care received in different regions and by different groups of patients within New Zealand.

The Health Quality and Safety Commission: making good health care better.

New Zealand has one of the best value health care systems in the world, but as a proportion of GDP our spending on health care has increased every year since 1999. Further, there are issues of quality and safety in our system we must address, including rates of adverse events. The Health Quality and Safety Commission was formed in 2010 as a crown agent to influence, encourage, guide and support improvement in health care practice in New Zealand.

Beyond the numbers: classifying contributory factors and potentially avoidable maternal deaths in New Zealand, 2006-2009.

Objective: We sought to describe a new classification system for contributory factors in, and potential avoidability of, maternal deaths and to determine the contributory factors and potential avoidability among 4 years of maternal deaths in New Zealand.

Study Design: A new classification system for reporting contributory factors in all maternal deaths was developed from previous tools and applied to all maternal deaths in New Zealand from 2006 through 2009.

Results: There were 49 deaths and the maternal mortality ratio was 19.