The Collaborating Centres for Safe Health Care
The Collaborating Centres for Safe Health Care brings diverse disciplines together to research and develop innovations for the delivery of safe health care.
Based at Victoria University of Wellington, the Collaborating Centres for Safe Health Care (CCSHC) aims to bring together a wide range of individuals and organisations working on different aspects of safe health care around the world.
Preventable harm in health care can occur due to, for example, a test being missed, administration of the wrong drug, or the wrong operation being performed. Surprisingly, this is frequent—approximately one in ten people receiving care in New Zealand’s public hospitals will experience minor, short-term harm, and for one in one hundred people, this will have serious, long-term, or permanent effects.
20% of the health budget goes towards fixing this harm and there is also significant emotional impact for patients, whānau, and families, as well as health care providers.
Over the past two decades patient safety improvement has focused on fixing what goes wrong in rare, serious events, but only minor improvements have occurred. Preventable causes are difficult to identify, and it is equally difficult to implement change. Modern approaches favour turning this around by also focussing on the frequent, less serious events, and to identify why health care goes right 90% of the time in almost identical circumstances.
What we do
The CCSHC has been set up to support a network that brings diverse disciplines together to research and develop innovations for the delivery of safe health care.
The CCSHC uses social networking approaches to connect health stakeholders to disciplines that can research factors that ensure safe care is provided, identify factors that contribute to harm, and evaluate and validate strategies that have the potential to support safe health care delivery.
Victoria University of Wellington provides the infrastructure to support ethical research practices, ensure confidentiality, and provide objective, robust analysis and reporting.
The team
The CCSHC is led by Dr Brian Robinson in the School of Nursing, Midwifery, and Health Practice.
Health professionals have led the patient safety movement by adopting strategies from other industries, such as aviation and transportation, energy and petrochemical production. There is the need for health-specific safety strategies to be developed in conjunction with disciplines that inform aviation and energy production safety.
Victoria University of Wellington has many of these disciplines: the scientific disciplines of psychology and biological sciences; the social sciences; the applied sciences of engineering, computing, and industrial design; and the disciplines of business, management, and government.
Drawing on this expertise within the University, the CCSHC collaborates with health care providers to develop and evaluate safety solutions.
Recent projects
Sheehy, K., Robinson, B., & Wailling, J. (2018). Report to ACC: Private surgical hospital innovation in infection prevention. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington.
Wailling, J., Robinson, B., & Te Morenga, L. (2019). Report to CCDHB: Safe and supportive workplace. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington.
Hales, C., Amankwaa, I., Gray, L., & Rook, H. (2019). ARC Extreme: Aged residential care needs of older adults with extreme obesity. Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington.