Patient safety 2012: Reporting in from the bedside of a regional Australian hospital

This week has not been particularly good for me. I now do critical care in a small eight-bed unit, which serves a 130-bed regional hospital on the NW Coast of Tasmania, that in turn along with another hospital on the coast serves a population of 130 000. We have all the usual services that you would expect for a place of this size, along with all the usual problems that rural and regional hospitals have to deal with. We have dedicated and competent clinical staff, led by a hospital executive, that has to deal not only with severe financial constraints, the ever-changing political environment, media that does not quite get it, but has to ensure service delivery with what at times can be a very precious (and all too often locum) senior medical staff. We have a competent and active quality unit that has enacted craft group mortality and morbidity meetings that feed into a central committee that is Chief Executive Officer (CEO)-led. So despite my bad week, I think that our organisation in the circumstances does a great job in providing a quality health service to the population.