Healthcare & Laboratory Accreditation
Who are we?
Working in partnership with Gael Quality, Qmach is a specialist provider to the Healthcare industry and Laboratory Accreditation for Gael's UK leading Quality, Compliance and Safety Management software Q-Pulse.
What do we do?
Increase quality and safety while reducing risk levels in the Healthcare and Laboratory Accreditation Sector.
What are the top challenges we are seeing in the market right now?
- Resource intensive Document Control procedures that produce huge and unmanageable volumes of paper that is difficult to audit and hinder, rather than help the organisation.
- Audit plan, CA/PA management and system unable to stand up to unannounced audits; everything requires preparation, plus resulting non-conformances not being completed in a timely manner.
- Managing staff competence in relation to the Knowledge and Skills Framework (KSF) to ensure that the right competence based and renewal training is identified, scheduled and completed in a timely manner.
- Being able to proactively ensure staff are competent and using the correct revision of SOPs, rather than relying solely on Examination Audits to identify competency issues, problems and gaps.
- The manual capture of Incident Reports (IR1s) for rekeying into trust systems is a one way exercise to satisfy trust needs, without providing local feedback and analysis to those who are in a position to act.
- Managing meetings, their actions and the meeting minutes lacks an open, visible, transparent and slick mechanism to manage the whole process to ensure timely completion of actions and properly control change.
- Trust and external pressure to implement ever more robust and transparent systems to reduce risk and demonstrate continuous improvement.
- Maintaining existing systems to satisfy legal, CPA and other standards requirements is complex, time consuming, resource intensive and expensive.
- No means of easily identifying risk and gaps in existing systems; gaps usually arise as a result of a complaint or clinical incident.
- Reliance on paper based External Quality Assurance (EQA) Scheme records and the difficulties tracking the comments, corrective and preventive actions.
- The paper based logging of sample reception and equipment errors is just a recording exercise that offers little or no value in the way of identifying opportunities to improve or building a case for equipment replacement.
How do we address these challenges?
By providing a central software framework that connects previously disjointed quality and safety activities, supported by a range of Professional Services.
Who have we done this for?
The organisations we work with in partnership with Gael Quality range from individual departments such as Pathology or Pharmacy, to multi discipline, multiple site trusts and include Good Hope Hospital NHS Trust, Hull Royal Infirmary, Manchester Children's Hospital and Nottingham University Hospital to name a few.
Which means that...
A common framework for current quality and safety needs is established to manage and demonstrate compliance to CPA, MHRA, HFEA, IR(ME)R, HTA, the ISO's and other such standards, resulting in:-
- A single central repository for all controlled documents with a streamline electronic process for managing all aspects of access and change control.
- An effective and well executed audit planning and CA/PA programme that allows organisations to be 'always prepared', avoiding the weeks of pre audit preparation, reduce overall costs and the risk of Non Conformance.
- Your competency requirements being readily managed to ensure that all staff needs are automatically identified in relation to their job role, meaning that their skills are maintained in a timely manner in line with KSF.
- Proactively ensure staff training needs are identified when controlled documents change, plus track their 'Read and Understood' status to ensure staff know and confirm they are aware of each new SOP or revision.
- Capture IR1s electronically and manage the subsequent investigation with ease, by classifying, risk assessing and analysing incidents so you are able to act on the findings and continuously improve reducing risk.
- One central system to securely manage meeting actions to ensure effective delegation, communication and action tracking with minutes instantly available on meeting completion, eliminating the 'weekly wait' and providing accountability with visibility of deadlines and control over change.
- Deliver continuous improvement through efficient regulatory compliance and be able to demonstrate your compliance status on demand.
- The automation of system tasks with visibility on resources and their workload, reducing complexity, cost and increasing resource utilisation.
- Risk and gaps being readily identified so internal controls can be improved before these risks and gaps result in an adverse incident.
- The elimination of the bureaucracy associated with the distribution, corrective and preventive action management with various EQA Schemes, saving time and cutting your 'cost of accreditation'.
- Delivering value from your error logging activities to identify opportunities to improve, build a case for equipment replacement and measure service contract effectiveness.
We'd love the opportunity to discuss these and any other challenges you may be facing to validate if our solutions are appropriate for your organisation too.
Please feel free to contact us at info@qmach.com or call us directly on +44 (0)1482 652153 to arrange a mutually convenient time to do so.