Recognising World Patient Safety Day – How Icon is fostering a diagnostic and patient safety culture

2024 theme: improving diagnosis

This year the theme is “Improving diagnosis for patient safety” with the slogan “Get it right, make it safe!”, highlighting the critical importance of correct and timely diagnosis in ensuring patient safety and improving health outcomes.

What is a diagnosis: A diagnosis identifies a patient’s health problem and is a key to accessing the care and treatment they need.

What is a diagnostic error: A diagnostic error is the failure to establish a correct and timely explanation of a patient’s health problem, which can include delayed, incorrect, or missed diagnoses, or a failure to communicate that explanation to the patient.

Find out more about World Patient Safety Day 2024

How Icon is striving for improved diagnosis in cancer care

At Icon, we’re committed to enhancing diagnostic safety with our innovative services and dedicated team, ensuring patients receive the highest-quality care. Here’s how:

• Implementing Diagnostic Services – We’re partnering with diagnostic providers and offering in-house diagnostic services (such as PET-CT) to deliver a seamless, comprehensive model of care.
• Investing in Theranostics – Theranostics is a cutting-edge, personalised treatment combining ‘therapy’ and ‘diagnostics’ to offer more targeted care. This program is up and running at Icon Cancer Centre North Lakes with a strong pipeline of growth across Australia and ASEAN.
• Enhancing Collaboration – Our multidisciplinary team meetings (MDTs) foster a collaborative approach to patient care, ensuring diagnosis to treatment is well-informed across all divisions.
• Prioritising Patient-Centred Care – Our teams engage with patients in a number of ways to understand their experiences to provide the best possible care. Whilst in our care, patients are their families are empowered to discuss any new outcomes of care that they experience, which includes diagnosing treatment side effects and identifying ongoing care and support to meet their needs.
• Supporting Patients with Specialist Nurses – Our network includes Prostate Cancer Nurses, Bowel Cancer Nurses and Cancer Care Coordinators who assist patients in navigating complex systems while advocating for their diagnostic and supportive needs.
• Early Detection – In Singapore, we offer dedicated Health Screening Services that focus on identifying health conditions early, leading to better treatment outcomes.
• Global Quality Processes – Icon has a global approach to quality and safety with a centralised Quality team ensuring quality and patient safety procedures, processes and mandatory training are met, audited and assessed.
• National Pharmacy Clinical Governance – Icon’s Quality and Medication Safety Unit (QMSU) ensures clinical governance, quality and safety across all pharmacy services and works alongside the cancer care division to uphold patient medication safety.

At Icon, we’re constantly working to improve diagnostic safety by addressing the root causes of diagnostic errors, such as communication gaps, training needs, and heavy workloads. Our continued efforts include:

• Multidisciplinary teams with centralised medical records to streamline patient care.
• Clinical handovers at all sites to ensure critical information is communicated effectively, leaving no room for oversight.

Patient Safety Culture Survey – taking action

In 2023, Icon introduced our first Patient Safety Culture Survey, designed to gain valuable insights into patient safety from the perspective of our teams—a key component in ensuring comprehensive, high-quality patient care. This survey focused primarily on our cancer centres and has evolved to incorporate our pharmacy services.

In the last survey, 86% of responses reflected a positive patient safety culture. From these results we continue to implement and improve quality processes and procedures across our global network to meet our goals and further strengthen our safety culture and foster excellence in patient care.