Patient safety will be the first focus of a Southern District Health Board project that aims to cut costs while improving services.
Announced yesterday, the ''quality improvement and performance excellence strategy'' aims to reduce health inequalities, reduce costs, improve staff professional development and improve patient safety.
''The next few months will see the strategy rolled out across the organisation to introduce staff to the methodologies and tools that will support them to improve their quality improvement and performance measures.
''The new strategy is part of the DHB's ongoing commitment to achieving its ... vision of becoming a high-performing, unified organisation which places patients at the centre of every decision it makes, and provides financially and clinically sustainable services to the community it serves,'' a health board statement said.
Patient safety would be the project's first area of focus.
The Otago Daily Times requested an interview with intensive care clinical leader Mike Hunter, one of three staff members who formulated the initiative, but he was unavailable. He would be available today for an interview, a spokeswoman said.
Association of Salaried Medical Specialists executive director Ian Powell said the project would provide a proper framework for making decisions, and for holding the board ''to account''.
Potentially hindering its aims was the fact the board was still ''highly managerial'' and ''top-down''. Mr Hunter was the right spokesman for the project, which required plain speaking rather than ''managerial jargon'', Mr Powell said.
''I think it's a good initiative, but it is going to require the right culture in the DHB to deliver on it, and Southern is still well short of that.''
It was not a ''magic wand'', but should prevent conflicts such as the row last year between managers and emergency department staff, by guiding resourcing decisions.
The other staff members on the panel were corporate services general manager Cherie Wells, and quality director Tina Gilbertson.
