Harm Prevention in the Emergency Department

Emergency departments and urgent care centres are high-risk settings.

To help improve patient safety, VMIA partnered with Safer Care Victoria and the Australasian College for Emergency Medicine to connect health services with world-leading harm prevention initiatives.

Working with clinical experts, we identified eleven recommended interventions to:

• help clinical practitioners make decisions at the point of care
• give them easier access to information
• mobilise resources available in the wider system for local need
• build and share practitioners’ knowledge and skill.

The recommendations build on the culture of continuous improvement in our health system and complement the ongoing significant work towards our shared goal of improved outcomes for all Victorians.

Our main report, Preventing patient harm in emergency and urgent care settings [PDF, 6.07MB], outlines project findings and recommendations in detail. Improving outcomes in emergency and urgent care [PDF, 200KB] provides a brief summary of the recommendations.

The supporting document, Emergency and urgent care – the long-term system opportunities [PDF, 345KB], highlights other opportunities for improvement identified during our research.

We’re currently working with our partners to deliver these initiatives across Victoria.

The Harm Prevention Team is currently co-designing with the sector two bundles of care for patients presenting with dizziness and back pain in emergency departments. These bundles will be piloted in a Victorian public health service, and our aim is to complete and evaluate the project by June 2024.