Part 1
By Mr. Frank Zhou, Team Leader of China Medical Team in NRH of Solomon Islands
Dear readers of Solomon Islands, the 1st China Medical Team in Solomon Islands has worked in National Referral Hospital for over 9 months. Over this period, we acquired a good understanding of the public hospital system in this country. A common saying goes like this: “Mutual understanding is the breeding ground for fruits of friendship”. Starting from today, I will introduce the performance management in Chinese public hospital to you. It is my sincere intention that it can help the local people know more about China.
- Index system of Macro Policy
In Jan 2019, General Office of China’s State Council issued Instructions on Strengthening Performance Assessment in Tertiary Public Hospital. It specified, from national level, performance assessment index system over tertiary hospitals. Such document also provided quantitative assessment basis for public welfare nature, functional positioning, improving medical service quality and efficiency. The system is constituted by medical treatment quality, management efficiency, sustained development, and satisfaction evaluation. Such system is available for all provinces and specifies partial indexes as national monitoring ones. All provinces are encouraged to appropriately complement and shoulder partial assessment indexes of mandatory plans with consideration of the reality.
- Medical treatment quality
The fundamental task of tertiary public hospital is to provide high quality medical treatment. Medical treatment quality control, reasonable prescription, homogenized tests or inspection is the index to assess medical treatment quality and safety of individual hospital. The symbolic single disease quality control index is chosen to assess the hospital’s key disease category, major medical treatment quality and safety. With indexes of medical appointment, outpatient and emergency service, patients’ waiting time, they are adopted to assess hospital management to improve medical service.
- Management efficiency
Management efficiency best represents delicacy management level of hospital and can be regarded as key to scientific management of hospital. Medical resources utilization efficiency can be assessed by index of human resource proportioning and staff workload. Economic management index is used to assess hospital economic management status. Balance of revenue and expenditure index indirectly reflect government implementation of medical care as well as rationality of medical income structure in hospital. This specific index promotes balance of revenue, expenditure and even cash surplus. It also embodies technical services value of medical staff. The assessment on changes of average bill from outpatient and inpatient service indicates the initiatives taken by hospital to control unreasonable increase of bill.
- Sustained development
Talents cultivation and teaching/scientific research capacity symbolize the sustained development of hospital. They are also key indexes reflecting innovation and healthy sustained management of tertiary public hospital. Talents structure index is chosen to assess the stability of medical staff; clinical transformation index of scientific research achievement is adopted to assess hospital support towards innovation; technology application index is used to assess general condition of hospital to lead development and sustainable management condition; public credit comprehensive evaluation level index aims to assess credit construction of hospital.
- Satisfaction assessment
Patients’ satisfaction and medical staff satisfaction compose satisfaction towards hospital. Patients’ satisfaction is a major index to reflect social benefits of individual tertiary public hospital. Improvement in medical staff satisfaction guarantees to provide high quality medical treatment. Assessment on satisfaction of outpatient, inpatient and medical staff is effective to measure sense of gain from the patients and motivation of medical staff.
(Translated by ZHAO Yi, School of Foreign Languages, Guizhou Medical University)
