Clinical Governance Failings in Bundaberg Hospital Incident

Running head:PUBLIC HEALTH
PUBLIC HEALTH
Name of the Student
Name of the university
Author’s note

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Introduction
Health care facilities and the hospitals are accountable to deliver the best possible care to
the patients and maintain an extensive risk management frame work across all the levels of the
health care facilities (Groene et al., 2014). Specific protocols have been issued by the Australian
government and each clinical settings also have their respective governance guidelines. Despite
of all the stringent laws and norms most of the clinical settings fail to meet up to the standards of
the clinical governance.
List of the main clinical governance failings identified in the Bundaberg hospital incident
The failure of the clinical governance is evidenced by the malpractice of an Indian based
doctor who was being investigated for over 87 deaths in a hospital in Queensland. The mishaps
included a considerable number of stillbirths and infant mortality (Casali&Day, 2010). Some of
the areas that has been identified are as follows:-
 One of the important failure is the lack of congruence among the organizational staffs. The
codes of ethics and the guidelines are not sufficient in counteracting the negative influence of
the informal codes of practice undermining the community standards and the organizational
values. It is important to mention that as per the review report of the Bundaberg incident, the
hospital’s codes of ethics was written in a style that reflected the bureaucratic culture of the
organization (Casali&Day, 2010).

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 Not only the doctor, but the health mangers of the clinical settings and there
organizational heads also overlooked the repeated complaints of the patients and paved
the way for the doctors negligence. The culture of covering up the flaws instead of proper
investigation is one of the example of a poor culture in an organization (Waxman et al.,
2014).
 The common areas of governance failure is that the quality of the care provided wad not
up to the standard (Waxman et al., 2014). Although some voices from the organization
raised some concerns about the substandard care, but lack of governance and the
prevalence of corruption in each of the levels of the health care setting suppressed those
voices (Wilkinson et al., 2015).
 Another issue that has been identified that a large number of competent medical frontline
workers resigned from the hospital due to repeated bullying, intimidation and
victimization(Casali& Day, 2010).
 Another important factors is the lack of communication between the hospital and the
formal controlling agency, who are responsible for ensuring safety standards for the
hospitalCasali& Day, 2010). Poor teamwork and collaboration between the team
members led to the occurrence of the adverse events (Ezziane et al., 2012).
 The formal organizational procedures in relation to the reporting of the sentinel events in
Queensland hospital suffered from a downfall.Unhealthy organizational culture is one of
the main contributor of these types of incidents (Morton, 2005).. Weak cultures poses
barriers to ethical decision making process. Congruence between the individual’s values
in everyday practice is necessary to avoid the occurrence of these types of incidents every
day.