Background
The Portland is the only private hospital for women and children in London. The hospital offers specialist care from conception, through birth to paediatric medicine. Its consultants cover a wide range of areas of paediatric medicine and women's health while its specialised Women's Outpatient Centre provides full gynaecological diagnostic services.
The challenge
The Portland wanted to achieve CHKS accreditation within three years. The hospital felt that not only would accreditation of its standards and processes ensure it continued to deliver high quality care, but that the accreditation process would help it to find areas for further improvement.
The solution
The hospital decided to employ a risk manager for obstetrics and midwifery with responsibility for overseeing the accreditation process. Former midwifery sister Sue Ellis took the post in 2011. “It was a little daunting to begin with,” says Sue. “I was given an accreditation manual as part of the induction process and I knew it was being taken seriously.”
One of the first steps was to work with colleagues across the hospital to divide the standards across the hospital. “We created a team of people with a lead for each standard,” says Sue. Two people within team had access to the CHKS Accreditation Online tool – a web-based support system that helps to streamline the process and enable programme management and implementation. “We looked at each standard and took a view as to how well it was being met which then gave us a traffic light indicator. Green meant we felt we had met the requirements, amber was for partially meeting them and red meant we weren’t meeting them. Where we had given a green we compiled evidence to show how we were meeting the standards.”
“Our CHKS accreditation consultant started to work with us as soon as we registered and was very supportive. He helped us work out which standards were not going to be applicable.”
Sue says the team’s strategy for the meeting accreditation standards meant they weren’t searching around for evidence late on in the process and this was helped by having regular team meetings. Although stressful, the inspection itself was geared towards imparting experience and learning and was not an interrogation as had been expected.
Benefits of working with CHKS
As well as being accredited by CHKS, the Portland is the only private maternity provider to be accepted by the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in their national NHS audit of maternity outcomes. Sue believes that the CHKS accreditation process has played a part in this and definitely led to improvements. “We were asked to evidence clinical guidelines, but we actually wanted to take this further and we set up a maternity clinical audit working group,” says Sue.
This group has now been up and running for two years and according to Sue has gone from strength to strength. Initiatives like foetal heart monitoring project where stickers are used to show that an assessment has been carried out is just one example of the improvements that have been made by the group. “I’m not sure this would have happened without accreditation and since accreditation we have completed a number of new projects which ultimately improve the quality of care we provide,” says Sue.
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