You have an aspiration…to set up a gold-standard healthcare facility which provides reasonable services without any compromise on quality of patient experience. You want your hospital to be the benchmark in your segment. You can achieve all this with the help of a robust quality assurance protocol.

A quality assurance protocol gives a structure to the standard operating procedures and the processes to be conducted. At every step of operation in a hospital to assure that standards of excellence and safety are maintained. Throughout the length and the breadth of the organization. Quality assurance protocol in hospitals defines the measures devised to enhancement in the quality of medical care. Before errors occur, the root causes are identified, and the likelihood of adverse events is determined so that timely measures can be initiated to minimize them or prevent them altogether.

 To assure that your quality is at par with the global standards, you will have to ascertain that your vision of quality trickles down to every tier of your organization from the heads of the department to the parking attendant and all of you as a team are committed to the assurance of quality.

Quality assurance is essential to fulfilling patient expectations and finetuning processes in order to enhance patient experience and improve clinical outcomes.

Assuring quality healthcare is a collaborative effort and requires continuous, complete, and cohesive dedication from every member of your team.

Benefits of quality assurance

1. Establishes quality protocol with minimum efforts
2. Ensures quantifiable patient outcomes.
3. Lacunas that can be addressed with timely measures are highlighted.
4. Helps you determine new spheres of development.
5. Improves the delivery and the speed of services.
6.  How to set a quality assurance protocol

1. Develop a quality assurance framework

If you want to set a benchmark in quality, you will have to choose a quality assurance team which will incorporate a panel of leaders from across departments to brainstorm and set a quality framework for your hospital. This panel of experts should include administrators, physicians, technicians, finance experts, client servicing heads and many more so that each and every department of your hospital is represented. The panel should be instructed to review current guidelines, recommend necessary alterations, make suggestions about new standards, and set new targets.

This quality assurance panel should review three spheres namely structure, operations, and outcomes to assess quality of patient care. The suggestions given by this committee can help you redefine your existing quality requisitions or set a new quality benchmark.

2. Convey your quality protocol to your team

Your quality assurance exercise will only be successful if it is followed by everyone in your hospital from the most experienced surgeon to the ward boy who has just joined. Make sure that each member of your team knows about your emphasis on quality and is on the same page when it comes to following the rules and regulations. A single lapse by a single person can lead to the collapse of the entire system like a house of cards.

Convey your quality assurance protocol to your team by conducting meetings and seminars or through mails. Put up notices and posters on every floor pertaining to quality.

3. Monitor continually

Quality assurance is not a one-time process…it has to become a habit…a way of functioning for your team. Be sure to have monitoring systems in place to assess your team’s performance through patient feedback collection and review with superiors and colleagues. Performance indicators should be kept an eye on to ensure that the quality benchmark is reached anytime.

4. Make timely corrections and changes

Your quality assurance protocol should be such that you can speedily identify any gaps or lacunae in patient safety or wellbeing or procedural correctness and proactively address them before they escalate.

This may involve steps like

• Replacing outdated equipment
• Refurbishing your space
• Retraining your staff
• Initiating changes in existing protocol.
• Expanding your facility

To summarize, if you want your healthcare organization to be the best, then you must develop a sturdy quality assurance system. If you need any help in establishing the safety protocol of your healthcare institution, be sure to contact Hospertz, a leading hospital consultancy firm of India. Our versatile team of experts has decades of experience in this field and can help you develop quality assurance protocols for your hospital customized to fit your requirements.

A blog has been written by Dr.Vishal Jadhav, a veteran in the field of hospital consultancy with a rich experience of more than 20 years and founder of the Healthcare Consultancy Firm, Hospertz.

Dr. Vishal Jadhav, Director
hospertz@gmail.com
+91 9867712705/ 9820833149