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Day
Surgery
HQS
has been working with the British Association of Day Surgery
(BADS) on a quality programme, specifically developed for
day surgery services.
The
project with BADS has given HQS the opportunity to develop
quality standards for a specific clinical service. This follows
the HQS strategy to ensure that standards are clinically relevant
and to develop bespoke service-based programmes.
The
standards were developed with input from BADS' council members
and are based on the structure of the existing HQS standard
for acute day care, augmented to reflect the particular requirements
for high quality day surgery services. The next stage was
to pilot these. Organisations represented on BADS council
were canvassed and four trusts volunteered: the day surgery
services at City General Hospital - Stoke on Trent, Princess
Alexandra Hospital Harlow, King's College Hospital and Milton
Keynes General Hospital. In order to get the pilot units started
an introduction and training session was held in December
2001, where HQS took representatives through the process involved
in working to demonstrate achievement of the standards to
a team of peer reviewers. Pilot organisations then completed
self-assessments and prepared action plans for any gaps where
standards were not in place.
Peer
review surveyors to assess the pilot sites' compliance with
the standards were recruited through BADS and took part in
a training day at HQS in May. This ensured familiarity with
the process and enabled a practice run at the interview techniques
needed in order to carry out peer review audit. Three of the
services undertook a pilot survey, carried out over one day,
with two peer reviewers on each, supported by an HQS client
manager.
The
general findings from the surveys were of enthusiastic staff
teams committed to providing a high quality, efficient service.
Clinical practice was judged to be of a very high standard
but not always supported as well as it should be by documentation
that would help improve the efficiency and consistency of
the service. One of the key findings was the importance of
having input from day surgery at a strategic level in the
trust, given the importance of day surgery in delivering the
NHS plan.
The
experience of the pilot services has informed revisions to
the standards and process and the HQS Day Surgery Service
Accreditation Programme is now available.
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