Clinical Governance main features

Hospital Pharmacy

The Hospital Pharmacy is an essential service of the Medical Office staff. It is involved in managing supply and stocks of medicines (drugs, vaccines, and experimental drugs), dressing materials, medical devices, antiseptics and disinfectants, and it promotes safe and effective use of medication, offering drug therapy advice to doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals within the hospital and monitoring, preventing or minimising side effects and drug interactions.

Hospital Infection Committee

At Centro Cardiologico Monzino the infection control relays on the Hospital Infection Committee, which is responsible for the surveillance of infections and for the development of procedures for the prevention and containment of the hospital infections.
Trained health care staff takes care of selecting reports in order to highlight the actual cases of hospital infections, defined on the basis of international clinical and laboratory criteria developed by the CDC (Center of Disease Control).

Patient Satisfaction

Patient satisfaction represents a significant issue for Centro Cardiologico Monzino. The starting point is given by the consciousness that the level of patient satisfaction is an important resource for the reorganization of services and processes in response to the expectations of the patients. The patient satisfaction surveys (requested by Lombardia Region to all Health Institutions for outpatient department services and inpatient area) are performed every six months. Data are collected and analyzed and the results are periodically sent to the local regulation centre (ASL) and to both Centro Cardiologico Monzino General Management and Quality Office.

Patient Education

A comprehensive program of patient education has been developed since 2009 by an interdisciplinary committee to improve patient information about important topics related to cardiovascular diseases and quality of life (i.e. treatments, food intake, rehabilitation, physical activities).

The publication of booklets and innovative information media represents the primary output of the program. Thanks to the cooperation with all the health operators, the booklets are constantly increasing in number and updated.

Patient Safety and Clinical Risk Management

Since 2005 Centro Cardiologico Monzino has been performing a Patient Safety program, with the creation of the Patient Safety and Risk Management Committee and the nomination of a Risk Manager figure. Consequently in these years, four Root Cause Analyses of problematic cases have been performed. Furthermore, regular meetings have been activated to analyze the most serious events happened and internal education has been implemented to increase professionals awareness about the topic.

Clinical Audit

In order to obtain an improvement of clinical healthcare through its critical appraise, Centro Cardiologico Monzino started in 1998 an experimental program of review focused on the most critical cardiovascular procedures. The first scrutinized area was the Cardiovascular Surgery. Later on, clinical audits were performed also in the Interventional Cardiology and in the Electrophysiology areas. In the last years the strategic project “Clinical Audit” was implemented, further increasing the analysis of Centro Cardiologico Monzino’s activities, expanding the concept of self-evaluation and periodical discussion of clinical performances to identify actions to improve clinical processes.