There are regular events in the daily work of Canadian health care organizations that may create dread in the minds of some staff.
Accreditation is one of those events and it's coming in May. Accreditation is an assessment of our work by a national team of professionals. Health organizations in Canada must meet certain standards or essentially rework their entire system. It's like writing THE final exam. Although less so in recent years because of a change in the very way change is handled in Sun Country Health Region, this visit every three years by a team from Accreditation Canada can cause a few grey hairs for the people who organize it.
The Accreditation Canada team comes into our health care facilities and evaluates our performance against national standards of excellence. The team members can talk to any one of our 2,300 employees, patients, residents or clients, and members of the public, while examining all aspects of health care, from patient safety and ethics, to staff training, effective governance, and partnering with the community.When we pass accreditation, it will mean SCHR was assessed by its peers in Canada and that we have met or exceeded national standards of excellence. There will also be likely some recommendation to guide us as we continue to strive for high quality health care. This process is less hair-raising in recent years because we established a system a few years ago that ensures improvement to our services on a continuous basis. We don't just wait for the three-year test any more.SCHR has created internal committees to continually monitor the latest practices in health care and adopt those which are already proven to be the best.Since the last Accreditation, we have changed the way we prescribe medications for our long term care residents because of effective new methods of monitoring over-medication. We have applied new ways to reduce the risk of falling by a home care client or a long term care resident, since falls often cause a dramatic reduction in the quality of life. We've introduced better staff training to reduce infections in our facilities. Our Patient Safety Committee has helped to identify and change unsafe practices quickly. We've built a team of health professionals to improve the quality of life for those with chronic disease.
We've created a way to measure customer satisfaction, and we're training staff to always make the patient first in their minds. No organization is perfect, but when we are measured and found to shine, we will be proud of all of the staff who helped it to happen.
