Groves Memorial Community Hospital in Centre Wellington and the North Wellington Health Care Corporation (NWHC) (consisting of Louise Marshall Hospital in Mount Forest and Palmerston and District Hospital) each recently received three year accreditation certification.
The award is from Accreditation Canada (formerly Canadian Council on Health Services Accreditation). The three year accreditation status is the maximum term awarded to any organization.
Alliance president and Chief Executive Officer Jerome Quenneville, said, “This achievement recognizes the commitment of the staff, physicians, board, and volunteers to providing quality care and service in our community. The accreditation process involves self-assessment by hospital quality improvement teams and site visits by two teams of Accreditation Canada surveyors in September 2008. Our positive results reflect excellence in rural health care service delivery.”
The site visits included a review of documentation, team interviews, facility tours, and focus group meetings with various stakeholders. Tracers have been introduced as part of the on-site survey. A tracer involves surveyors, accompanied by a staff person, following the path of a patient or an administrative process to gather evidence about an organization’s quality and safety of care services. It often includes discussions with staff and patients.
The accreditation process allows Accreditation Canada and the hospitals to evaluate the organizations’ services by comparing them to nationally accepted standards. Accreditation provides a reference point on which the organizations can focus quality improvement efforts.
Groves and North Wellington Health Care were both commended for forming their alliance to maximize human resource sharing and joint program planning. In addition, the Alliance hospitals were commended for their quality and risk program including patient safety initiatives and development of the balanced scorecard reporting process. The hospitals were also recognized for the implementation of Meditech software to support patient care. Both corporations received high praise from their community partners.
NWHC was commended for clinical services planning completed in 2008 and the master program with its draft recommendations for future service delivery. Groves was commended for continued progress toward realizing a new hospital for the community.
Quenneville added, “Although we are very pleased with this acknowledgement of our successes, we continue to look for opportunities to improve.”
