Professional Practice

Principles for good clinical governance include maintenance of good professional practice and standards.

Several of the major professional associations and registration authorities have developed and published policies and guidelines for their professional disciplines about the components of good professional practice, and these include current standards relating to patient care (including ethical practice), responsibility to maintain clinical competence and practice within a defined scope of practice, and collaboration with colleagues.

Best practice combines the benefits of individual audit and review as well as engagement in initiatives designed to improve the performance of the systems in which health care professionals practice. This can involve mechanisms to allow measurement, reflection and benchmarking of clinician’s practice with the growing literature on the expected outcomes of clinical interventions.

In 2001, NSW Heath published The Clinician’s Toolkit for Improving Patient Care. This booklet provides the methodology for acquiring information on the quality of clinical care and for evaluating that care using accepted rigorous strategies. These strategies include audit, morbidity and mortality, peer review and the use of clinical indicators to ensure that systems provide the standard of care expected. This Toolkit provides useful information about the features of the various components of clinical practice review.

Useful Links

NSW Medical Board Code of Professional Conduct (2008)
Nurses and Midwives Board of NSW – Professional Standards and Code of Professional Conduct
NSW Health Code of Conduct
NSW Health Clinicians ToolKit
Good Medical Practice - A Code of Conduct for Doctors and Nurses