Clinical registries: the urgent need to address ethical hurdles

Time to make appropriate data collection more efficient to drive improvements in quality of care

Australia is committed to improving the measurement of its delivery of health services in order to improve quality and safety of care and increase transparency for consumers.1 The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care, established as an independent statutory authority in June 2011, has responsibility for leading this work. On its program is the drafting of national arrangements for clinical registries to monitor quality of care.2 Clinical registries synthesise patient treatment and outcome data, and report back to clinicians and contributing hospitals to allow outcomes and patterns of practice to be benchmarked (after risk adjustment) against other Australian and international units.