I would like to extend a huge thank-you to everyone at Providence for sharing our work and stories during our visit from Accreditation Canada surveyors. I am delighted to share that their visit has been a tremendous success.
The accreditation surveyors had glowing praise for Providence after spending the week visiting 10 of our sites and speaking with hundreds of staff, patients, residents and their families in order to evaluate our compliance with 29 priority processes.
During Friday morning’s general debrief, lead surveyor Jim Hornell remarked that, “I do fear that some of our surveyors will be applying for jobs here, and that speaks volumes to the quality of this organization.”
Here are some specifics of the initial results:
Accreditation Survey debrief
The weeklong Accreditation Canada Survey at Providence Health Care concluded with the release of preliminary results stating that PHC met more than 99% of the 3,000+ standards across our leadership, governance and clinical programs.
And for the second consecutive visit, we have met all of Accreditation Canada’s Required Organizational Practices (ROPs), which is an amazing accomplishment.
As a learning organization with a strong commitment to continual quality improvement, we are thankful to the accreditation surveyors for highlighting opportunities for further growth.
Overall highlights from this morning’s debrief included:
Strengths
- An organization that truly lives our mission, vision and values: Staff find person meaning with the work happening in the organization, and we have a culture of compassion and social justice.
- Research and innovation: Major momentum with encouraging people to try new and innovative things.
- Team member, leader and physician engagement: Staff are informed, engaged and eager to share.
- Reconciliation: Adding a new foundational principle to our strategic plan, many instances of deep listening and responding with action.
- Diversity: Real progress being made toward creating a welcoming culture to the diverse people we serve.
- Collaborative partnerships: Our approach to urban health, engaging multiple partners to truly address the complex medical and social needs of the people we serve.
- Strong inter-disciplinary teams: Whether in allied health or environmental services, everyone is pulling together as a team.
- Compassionate care: This comes from deep inside of each individual person who works here, and it really makes a difference.
- People-centred care: Providence are leaders in this area and are many, many years ahead of the curve in so many ways.
- Environmental stewardship: Reinvesting the money we save into new initiatives.
- Emergency preparedness: Despite our aging facilities, we have appropriate emergency responses and staff safety is clearly a concern.
Opportunities
- Aging infrastructure: Not everyone is going to the new St. Paul’s, so working within our existing sites is going to be a challenge.
- Human Resource strategy: Improving recruitment and retention strategies as staff are tired and many opportunities exist in all sectors.
- Maintaining current infrastructure pending new build
- Complex care needs: Aging population, and people now who are being diagnosed later in their disease progression.
- Updating policies and procedures: This took a backseat during COVID, but we need to stay on top of them.
- Operating Room demand: Increased demand particularly in specialization areas such as cardiac and renal.
- Cerner sub-optimization: Making sure that the investment that we’ve made in these systems are optimized and not sub-optimized with workarounds.
Next steps:
PHC’s Quality Improvement team will share the surveyor’s interim report with program directors and patient care managers to confirm accuracy, and any corrections will be submitted to Accreditation Canada.
We anticipate a final, detailed report from Accreditation Canada about their experiences at PHC in the next few weeks. Included with this report will be the final accreditation decision, which will be posted on connect and shared with all of you via PHC News.
In the months following this final report, Providence will submit evidence detailing the steps we’ve taken to address the gaps and areas of improvement identified in the report.
The last several years have been extraordinarily difficult for those of us working in health care. The fact that Providence has upheld our commitment to quality improvement and compassionate care to such a high degree, despite the considerable challenges we have faced, is a true testament to the strength of everyone who works here.
Thank you for your commitment to this accreditation process, and for the passion that you bring to work every day. I feel incredibly privileged to work alongside each and every one of you.
