Safety & quality: Oncology

Quality: a national target

Our National Quality Manager, Helen Fawns, specialises in governance, quality and risk management, and is focused on continuous quality improvement. Helen is a registered nurse and has a Master’s Degree in Health Service Management, focused on Quality. Helen has wide experience as a health care professional, working as a district nurse, oncology nurse and palliative care nurse. Working in Quality for the last 20 years, Helen has a passion for improving services and working with patients and consumers.  

Helen’s key role is developing and supporting Clinical quality and patient safety systems. These systems foster and develop an organisational culture in which quality and risk management for reduction of patient harm is an integral part of core business, enabling continuous quality improvement. A key element of this is partnership with Patients and Staff to meet and exceed the requirements of mandatory accreditation for GenesisCare Oncology against the Australian Commission for Safety and QualityNational Safety and Quality Health Service Standards. Helen believes that our patients should receive the highest quality of care.

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"We have to work together"

- In the words of one of our patients during treatment

The GenesisCare vision and values have strong links to safety and quality. At GenesisCare we focus on quality, care and efficiency to deliver even better outcomes and extend access to patients and communities in need.

GenesisCare is committed to ongoing improvement of patient care in all areas. While we have an excellent record in delivering quality patient care and managing risks, we continue to focus on improvements that will keep it at the forefront of health care delivery. To this end, GenesisCare prides itself on listening and responding to the needs of our patients. We continually evaluate and improve on all aspects of our performance through customer satisfaction surveys, feedback forms, focus groups and formal feedback processes. GenesisCare has a strong commitment to patient safety and quality and this is reflected in our organisation-wide approach to:

  1. Continuous review and improvement of our patient safety and quality systems
  2. Educating our patient services and health care provider teams of the importance of monitoring and reporting the safety and quality of the services they provide
  3. Ensuring accountability for the safety and quality of care at all levels of our organisation
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Know your rights as a patient

We aim to look after you and keep you safe during your treatment. We discuss care plans with our patients to assist with treatment.

The National Safety and Quality Health Service (NSQHS) Standards were developed by the Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care (ACSQHC) in consultation and collaboration with State and National jurisdictions, technical experts and a wide range of stakeholders, including health professionals and patients.

The Standards provide a quality assurance mechanism that tests and provide sound evidence as to whether relevant systems are in place to ensure standards of safety and quality are met, as well as providing a framework that allows health services to realise aspirational or developmental goals.

National GenesisCare Oncology Results

We are extremely proud to share our quarterly safety and quality results. Health quality and safety data is measured as the number of incidents per 1000 occasions of service. An occasion of service refers to any treatment or other service provided to out-patients in a health service facility. The incident rate for GenesisCare is less than 1 per 1000 occasions of service, demonstrating our commitment to risk management across our business

Despite our very best efforts, there is always room for improvement as we strive to keep all incidents to zero.

Keeping you safe

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