Home → Research Centres → Cceb → Research → CRIP

Cardiac Rehabilitation Indicator Project (CRIP)

Dr Natalie Johnson, Rhonda Walker, Janet Fisher (Heart and Stroke Register), Kerry Inder, (Vice President Cardiac Rehabilitation Association of NSW and Cardiac Rehabilitation Coordinator, Hunter Area Health Service), Robyn Winton, (Cardiac Rehabilitation Coordinator, HAHS), and Kate Dundas, (Cardiac Liaison Officer, Chronic Disease Management Program)

The development and use of performance indicators is advocated by the NSW Department of Health in its Framework For Managing the Quality of Health Services in NSW document. More recently, the Australian Cardiac Rehabilitation Association and the National Heart Foundation of Australia have also advocated the use of performance indicators. The aims of the Hunter Cardiac Rehabilitation Performance Indicator Project (CRIP) therefore are:

To design and implement a simple Area-wide process for the routine collection and timely reporting of cardiac rehabilitation (CR) performance indicator data
To use this data to monitor and improve the quality of cardiac rehabilitation services provided in the Hunter Region of NSW

The CRIP Team have gone a long way towards achieving the first aim: documentation kept by CR coordinators has been reviewed, standardised across programs and adapted so that data relating to the indicators the Team developed can be routinely collected across services. The Team are keen to work on the second aim when the data becomes available. It is fortunate that the Register is available so it is possible to link its population-based data with the CR data to calculate outcomes such as the proportion of eligible patients who receive an invitation to attend a CR program, and readmission and mortality rates among attenders and non-attenders.