Safety scandals in Australian hospitals are depressingly frequent. They stimulate special reports and an immediate flurry of action. The tragedy is that these safety incidents occur despite reporting, governance and oversight mechanisms that – if they were working properly – might have helped to detect the aberrant clinical care.

Lots of information is collected about hospital safety in Australia, but not all of it is shared with the right people.

This report looks at data on patient outcomes: routine data, clinical quality registry data, death audit data, incident reporting and investigation data, patient-reported experience measures, and patient-reported outcome measures.

A first step in improving hospital safety in Australia is to better use the information that is already collected, and to put it in the hands of people who can apply it. This report reviews different sources of information about safety of hospital care. It makes specific recommendations for each datasets, and two overarching recommendations: that the links between data sets should be stronger, and that data should be presented more clearly.

The data we have is an extremely valuable resource. Better use needs to be made of it by governments making it more accurate, relevant, accessible, and understandable.