Close
25 Aug 2016
Today, Australia’s leading health and regulatory minds met to discuss the latest on Australia’s globally unique system for regulating health practitioners and how future work could result in safer healthcare for all of us.
Hosted by Australia’s health practitioner regulators, the National Boards and AHPRA, the 2016 Research Summit was attended by over 222 delegates who gathered together to talk about the next frontier for developing our evidence-base to improve the way we regulate.
The theme of the summit was ‘patient safety through risk-based regulation’, and presenters discussed a range of topics, but at the heart of discussions was how to contribute to safer care for patients and health consumers.
‘In Australia, we collect genuinely unique national information for 14 groups of registered health professions. This data helps us find new and innovative ways to improve our regulatory processes for health practitioners and the public, it improves the quality and efficiency of our services and it encourages continuous improvement.’’ said AHPRA CEO Mr Martin Fletcher.
‘The real question in my view is ‘what can we do to prevent harm before it even happens’. Today we are a step closer to getting the evidence to inform better health policy, and that is a great thing for all of us’, said Mr Fletcher.
Today’s inaugural summit provided an excellent opportunity for the exchange of expertise and ideas between regulatory staff, experts in safety and quality in healthcare, health practitioners and leading health and medical researchers.
Mr Paul Shinkfield, AHPRA National Director of Strategy and Research said there was broad consensus at the end of the summit on key themes and areas for future work.
‘The clear desire from those who attended to form strong partnerships is critical to achieving sustainable and effective outcomes; in how we work in regulation, and how they work in the health service delivery and a range of related sectors.’
‘Our capacity to analyse and look deeper into the information we collect means there are great opportunities to do some very meaningful work. Being able to develop real, tangible evidence, makes for better regulatory policy and, ultimately, the opportunity to better ensure the effectiveness of our actions,’ said Mr Shinkfield.
Download a PDF of this Media release - Regulatory information can safeguard patients - 25 August 2016 (245 KB,PDF)