Spotlight on Quality: How to begin your Accreditation Journey
Beginning your accreditation journey within your organisation is a vital step towards enhancing patient safety, service quality, and operational excellence. It ensures efficiency and promotes staff engagement when it comes to discussing quality.
There are a range of different ways you can set up your accreditation programme to ensure that it is tailored to your organisation, such as scoring via 1-5 or Bronze, Silver and Gold.
Here is a quick how-to guide on starting your accreditation programme:
Discovery:
Familiarise your team with the standards required for accreditation. This includes patient safety, governance, clinical outcomes, and service delivery. Most bodies will provide comprehensive guidelines on what they expect from accredited institutions.
Begin an assessment throughout your organisation to highlight where quality improvement needs to take place and evaluate your organisations' current practices by conducting a gap analysis.
This will identify areas of risk and where you need to meet quality standards.
Use this as a foundation for your action plan.
Inspection Build:
Begin to assemble your dedicated accreditation team to oversee the accreditation process.
Whilst they address the gaps identified in the analysis, it might involve staff training, policy updates, and improvements in patient care processes. This team will drive those policy changes, training, and ensure all departments comply with accreditation requirements, as well as, ensuring that changes are implemented across your organisation.
The most important part of the inspection build is to provide your frontline teams with a regular inspection cycle such as peer and expert inspections, monthly assurance inspections or CQC inspections. Ensure that this is set-up as a regular inspection whether it is daily, weekly or monthly so that you and your central quality teams can track and monitor your progress to ensure your hospital is always inspection ready.
This will help you fine-tune areas that need attention before the actual assessment.
Reporting Build:
In order to create an enhanced view of your dashboards, it is important for you and your frontline teams to see a complete and real-time overview of your quality programme by combining all data collected in Tendable in a completely customisable format.
Our analytics portal is comprised of a set of out of the box dashboards for instant access to insights on your quality accreditation programme.
You can even build your own personalised dashboard from scratch by selecting from a library of pre-built charts or choosing your preferred datapoints and visualisation. This means you can tailor reporting to meet your needs – whether that’s reporting to the quality committee, board assurance or accreditation – the options are endless!
Test and Refine:
Once you're confident in your organisations' compliance and you have a regular inspection cycle, apply for your chosen accreditation. Ensure you and your frontline teams are prepared thoroughly for the on-site assessments and inspections.
By following these steps, your hospital will have the foundational requirements to begin to embed your accreditation programme.