Morbidity, Mortality and Clinical Audit

Morbidity and mortality meetings and clinical audit are cornerstones of good professional practice, and provide clinicians opportunity to:

• critically analyse the circumstances that surrounded an outcome;
• recommend process improvement;
• initiate the appropriate action for process improvement; and
• oversee progress.

The principles for conducting morbidity and mortality meetings are set out in The Clinician’s Toolkit.

Effective clinical governance fosters a culture of review and reflection, and HNE Health Clinical Governance actively supports initiatives such as morbidity and mortality meetings and clinical reviews. Such meetings already occur at many hospitals in HNE Health while efforts continue to set up meetings in others. Meetings at some centres are quite purposefully multi-disciplinary as the cases discussed often raise matters of combined interest to a range of clinical staff, as well as to facility or unit management. 

Clinical Governance may be able to support and/or be involved in mortality and morbidity reviews through their Patient Safety Officers, and encourage a multidisciplinary forum for discussing clinical (and non-clinical) matters.

Only the following Committees within HNE Health have been granted Qualified Privilege by NSW Health:

• John Hunter Hospital, Trauma Committee
• John Hunter Hospital, Surgical Audit Committee
• John Hunter Hospital, Maternal Mortality and Morbidity Committee
• John Hunter Hospital Obstetrics and Gynaecology Perinatal Mortality and Morbidity Committee
• Maitland Hospital, Perinatal Review Committee

For more information contact Associate Director Clinical Governance, Dr. John Fisher on (02) 6767 8881.

Useful Links

The Clinician’s Toolkit.