24/7/6 Seminar - Complex systems challenges in healthcare 



Speaker: Professor Michael Ward, School of Medicine
Title: Complex systems challenges in healthcare
Date: Monday 24th July
Time: 3pm
Room 78-420, The University of Queensland, St Lucia Campus

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Abstract

Health care systems in all industrialised nations are afflicted by
similar problems that include :

  - wide (up to 400%) variations in clinical outcomes in different
hospitals treating the same disease processes

  - high (around 10%) risk of incidental damage to patients accompanying
hospital care

  - a widening gap between community expectations of what is technically
possible and what is deliverable in practice

  - increasing concerns that the high costs of health care do not always
deliver proportionate patient benefits

There is growing recognition that the intractability of these problems
is in large part a reflection of the non-linear interactions within the
complex adaptive systems that abound in healthcare. It is also clear
that conventional hierarchical management methods and orthodox linear
analysis of healthcare data sets are no longer sufficient for this level
of interactive complexity. This is clearly a fertile field in which
academic-healthcare partnerships could be developed to find new
solutions to these problems.

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Biography

Michael Ward MB BS FRACP FRCP(Edin) Qualified Kings College Hospital 
London, and trained as a gastroenterologist at the Western General 
Hospital & University of Edinburgh.  Previously held positions as:
  - Director of Gastroenterology Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital
  - Director of Medicine at the Royal Brisbane and Women's Hospital
  - Interim Program Director for the Queensland Health Skills Development 
Centre,

Currently :
  - Head of Central Clinical Division of the University of Queensland 
School of Medicine (from Feb 2003)
  - Senior Director of Queensland Health Clinical Practice Improvement 
Centre. (From Feb 2005)

Research interests include clinical gastroenterology, organisational 
aspects of healthcare delivery, clinical information management systems, 
and applications of statistical process control methods in health care. He 
has authored or co-authored 90 publications in relation to this work Most 
of the recent service improvement activities have been in association with 
his role as co-sponsor of the Queensland Collaborative for Healthcare 
Improvement (CHI) This has resulted in the development of networks of over 
400 healthcare professionals in 25 hospitals in Queensland working 
together to improve quality and efficiency of care in a wide range of 
clinical services. Specific collaboratives include: cardiac, cardiac 
rehabilitation, renal, emergency department, and stroke. This work has led 
to the development of standardised methods to support clinicians in 
improving clinical practice such as the statewide electronic clinical 
indicator analysis system. These groups continue to be supported and 
expanded as clinical networks in the new Clinical Practice Improvement 
Centre.