improving
improving
Dr. Natasha Graham, a family physician, Mr. John Langs, a public member, and Dr. Jim Watters, a general surgeon, sit on the College’ s Quality Assurance Committee.
Assessing Our Assessment Process
As our peer assessment outcomes show, most physicians randomly chosen for a peer assessment perform well. For that smaller group of physicians who don’ t receive satisfactory outcomes in their assessments, there are well-established processes in place to identify practice deficiencies and provide remediation.
But over the last few years, we have been looking for ways to make the assessment more useful for the vast majority of physicians who are already practising good medicine. How can the physician emerge from the process with new tools and insights to deliver even higher quality care? So, we have been assessing our assessment process. The first step has been making our many peer assessors central to the process of redesign. Currently, we have physicians representing 14 discipline groups who are engaged in creating new assessment processes, tools and reporting formats, including developing discipline-specific quality indicators. Our assessors are developing and refining peer assessment handbooks; each handbook is discipline-specific and includes content tailored to the discipline. The handbooks define elements of quality and evaluation criteria for each of eight assessment domains, i. e., history, examination, investigation, diagnosis, management plan, medication, follow-up and monitoring, and documentation for continuity of care. Eventually, we will have tailored tools to apply to every clinical area of medicine that we assess.
By sharing their collective expertise and experience, our peer assessors are helping create assessment tools tailored to their respective discipline that establish a consistent, high bar of quality that exemplifies best practices. While not intended to replace other standards of care within their discipline, defining photo: D. W. Dorken
14 COLLEGE OF PHYSICIANS AND SURGEONS OF ONTARIO