Modern Tools for Orthopedics-Traumatology Department Sustainability Assessment

Healthcare providers invest substantial resources to establish and implement quality management systems and hospital sustainability, but there are a limited number of tools to assess implementation efforts and their effect on quality and safety outcomes. In a previous research, we developed the Health-Sustainability reference framework, which contains 57 indicators intended to improve the quality and sustainable development of health facilities and which is compatible with national and international standards applicable in the field. The new innovative way of numerical evaluation of the indicators of the Health-Sustainability reference frame, developed in this research, includes the values of an information couple composed of: the indicator significance and the indicator degree of fulfilment. Both categories of information are classified by numerical values from 0 to 5. The self-assessment tool has a tabular form, which allows the calculation of quality and sustainability indicators within the hospital. Validation in practice of the new Health-Sustainability reference framework was achieved through a pilot implementation of the reference framework for sustainable development and the self-assessment tool at Orthopedics-Traumatology Department of the Targu Mures County Emergency Clinical Hospital. The final results derived from the assessment based on the new reference framework are useful in establishing sustainability benchmarks and in developing sustainability policies.