the Hospital
City Health Care Partnership CIC (CHCP CIC), previously known as NHS Hull Provider Services, is an independent, 'for better profit' organisation that provides high-quality, safe health and care services in Hull, the East Riding of Yorkshire, Knowsley, and St. Helens. With 2000+ staff, they offer over 50 services in community settings, ranging from palliative care to dental, urgent care, and psychological well-being.
CHCP's primary objective is to deliver healthcare services that are safe, effective, and patient-centred. To accomplish this goal, they've assembled a team of specialist infection prevention and control nurses and practitioners who support the Director of Infection Prevention and Control (DIPC) to oversee IP&C practice, minimise the risk of Healthcare Associated Infections (HAIs) for patients, visitors, and staff and ensure compliance with the Health Act (2008).
For this project, MEG worked with the Infection Prevention and Control team at the City Health Care Partnership in the East Riding of Yorkshire.
The CHALLENGE
Prior to implementing MEG, the Infection Prevention and Control team at CHCP CIC were using another digital quality auditing tool. However, that system did not provide the functions or resources to generate and share action plans that the services and the staff could easily access through a shared platform.
This meant that any progress with action plans heavily relied on emailing Word documents between the team and the services and manually checking if the plans were being executed to close the loop. Simply put, the entire process was inefficient and time-consuming. They needed a better system to overcome this challenge.
CHCP CIC first saw the demonstration of the MEG Quality Auditing platform for Infection Prevention and Control at the IPS conference in Glasgow. They believed the system could significantly improve the reporting and monitoring functions and close the loop on action plans, kickstarting their journey with MEG.
“When we saw a demo of the MEG platform, it looked like a more interactive and flexible system that wasn’t purely acute-focused, and it would enable us to create a set of audit tools and a process for reporting and monitoring that would be really specific to our organisation. ”
the Solution
The implementation process of the MEG platform within CHCP began in April 2019. Combining next-generation mobile technology and point-of-care access, MEG's Audit and Inspection Module helps infection control teams minimise the risk of infection to patients, visitors, and staff.
Over the next few weeks, our implementation team worked on making small customisations to our existing IPS audit tools to suit the requirements of the Infection Prevention and Control team at CHCP. Once all the groundwork on the content of the audit tools was done and signed off, the live system was launched.
The new system would allow staff to automate and digitalise manual processes, automate reporting, make timely interventions, and fix issues faster using real-time reporting, report more accurate data, and promote a culture of quality improvement within the organisation.
“We found that the MEG support team was accessible, responsive and really tried to understand and capture what we were asking for as we were quite early implementers from the community settings, and we found that really helpful. ”
THE RESULT
Apart from helping the IP&C team perform comprehensive Infection Control audits, MEG's audit tool allows other teams to take ownership of specific elements within each audit. This is a significant advantage as it enables the IP&C staff to focus on the issues within their control and be assured that others are taking responsibility for tasks/issues assigned to them.
Another area that the organisation has benefitted from is reporting. Nursing leaders and management can now produce comprehensive reports and visual graphics on audits and progress with QIPs in mere minutes. This has created opportunities for services to prioritise and provide feedback, contributing to the overall patient safety and quality agenda within CHCP.
“Over the last 5 years of using MEG, we’ve experienced a level of support and flexibility that has really enabled us to adapt and improve the way we audit, report, and actually close the loop on the process to make real improvements in patient safety. ”
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