Beginning your accreditation journey within your organisation is a vital step towards enhancing patient safety, service quality, and operational excellence. An accreditation programme can support efficiency and staff engagement when it comes to discussing quality.
There are a range of different accreditation programme scoring frameworks that you can be tailored to your organisation and frame feedback reward or an escalation need. We've seen numbered scoring via 1-5 or Bronze, Silver and Gold frameworks working especially well.
Here's 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 provide comprehensive guidelines on what they expect from accredited institutions.
Conduct an assessment within your organisation of where you require quality improvement and evaluate your hospital’s 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. This team will drive policy changes, training, and ensure all departments comply with accreditation requirements.
This team will also ensure that changes are implemented across your organisation.
Whilst they address gaps identified in the analysis. This might involve staff training, policy updates, and improvements in patient care processes.
Provide your front-line teams with a regular inspection cycle such as peer and expert inspections, monthly assurance inspections or CQC inspections. Ensure that this is regular inspection 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 that fit your reporting needs. It is important for your front-line teams to have a complete and real-time overview of your quality programme in a completely customisable format.
Analytics supporting your accreditation programme should include compliance reporting based on deadlines of your inspection schedules, an area specific view to support area level feedback and improvement, and inspection level reports to highlight potential programme wide improvements or successes.
As you begin to bed in your accreditation programme, tagging inspections to improvement themes or regulation drivers including CQC quality statements can build a degree of confidence that your organisation is meeting its quality standards.
As your programme builds in maturity, bespoke and personalised dashboards can be built to tailor your reporting to your specific goals. This can be from scratch or by selecting from a library of pre-built charts or choosing your preferred datapoints and visualisation.
Test and Refine:
Once you're confident in your hospital's compliance and you have a regular inspection cycle, apply for your chosen accreditation. Ensure you and your front-line 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.
