The Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in Health Care has commenced development of the third edition of the NSQHS Standards. With a draft expected for consultation in 2026 and finalisation in 2028, health services have a window right now to think carefully about what this means for how they measure, monitor, and evidence the quality of care they deliver.

And the timing matters more than it might appear.

Two frameworks, one direction

In Victoria, the Health Services Performance Monitoring Framework 2025-26 has already moved. The emphasis is now squarely on outcomes: balanced financial performance, culturally safe services, timely access to emergency and planned care. Performance tiers are assigned based on both results and underlying risk. It is a more sophisticated, more consequential model than what preceded it.

The NSQHS third edition is signalling a similar shift nationally. Early consultation themes point toward outcomes-focused standards, stronger integration across the care continuum, and governance frameworks that demand more than policy documents on a shelf.

Together, these two frameworks are raising the bar for what it means to demonstrate safe, high-quality care. And they are doing it through data.

Where the metrics actually live

It is worth being precise about how quality and safety data sits in this landscape. The key indicators health services are held to — VHIMS incident reporting, hospital-acquired complications, deaths in low-mortality DRGs, avoidable readmissions, hospital standardised mortality ratios — are each governed by their own custodians. IHPA owns HAC definitions. AIHW owns HSMR methodology. Safer Care Victoria governs VHIMS through the Health Incident Management Policy.

The NSQHS Standards do not define how these metrics are calculated. What they do is require health services to demonstrate that they are monitoring them, acting on what they find, and embedding that cycle into their clinical governance.

That distinction matters because it means the standards create accountability for the analytics capability itself. It is not enough to have the data. Health services need to show they have the systems, the governance, and the analytical rigour to turn that data into evidence of improvement.

The gap most health services are carrying

In practice, many Victorian health services are still running quality and safety reporting from fragmented, manually intensive processes. Incident data sits in VHIMS but is not connected to clinical outcome measures. HAC rates are reported quarterly but not triangulated against care pathway data. HSMR is monitored centrally but not broken down in ways that drive local action.

As the NSQHS third edition takes shape, and as the Victorian PMF continues to tighten its focus on measurable outcomes, that gap is going to become harder to sustain.

What good looks like

Health services that are ahead of this curve have a quality and safety analytics domain that brings these indicators together in a single view: incidents alongside HACs, alongside mortality ratios, alongside readmissions. Not as isolated reports, but as a connected picture of where risk is concentrating and where care is performing.

That kind of capability does not need to be built from scratch. The methodologies are well established. The data is already being collected. What is often missing is the architecture to connect it, and the analytical layer to make it usable by the people who need to act on it.

An invitation

The consultation process for the third edition is open. Victorian health services have a genuine opportunity to shape what the next decade of national safety and quality standards looks like. That is worth engaging with.

And if you are thinking about whether your current analytics capability would hold up against the direction both frameworks are heading, it is a good time to be honest about the answer.

Evora's analytics accelerator includes a quality and safety domain purpose-built for Victorian health services, covering VHIMS incidents, HACs, deaths in low-mortality DRGs, avoidable readmissions, and HSMR. If you want to talk through where your current capability sits, I am happy to have that conversation.

Written By: Bernard Herrok, proofed by AI.