Accreditation Bulletin: 7 May

Accreditation Bulletin

This is a weekly bulletin to keep you up to date with what you need to know and do in the lead up to accreditation (7-11 June).

Preparing for accreditation is about ensuring you feel confident and comfortable when you meet with the assessors in June, to convey the great work that you do every day to deliver high-quality care and a positive patient experience.

Over the following weeks, we’ll be providing you with updates, resources, top tips, access to events and more.

The focus for next week

Here are the top things you can do next week to ensure we remain on track for accreditation:

1. Book in a Give Me Five or Annual Performance discussion
2. Clinicians, log in to Latte and complete your Basic Life Support (BLS) training
3. Ensure displayed posters and brochures on your wards and areas are up-to-date (more information below)

Accreditation Resources

In this edition, you’ll find resources and guides to help you prepare and plan for accreditation. Download them, print them out, discuss them with your teams and put them on your employee noticeboards.

EMR, documenting and comprehensive care Quick Reference Guides (QRGs)

Providing high-quality, comprehensive care is one of the most important things we do as a health service. It’s critical we communicate and correctly document the care we provide so team members and other clinicians associated with patient care have the complete picture.

Accreditation gives us the opportunity to showcase the collaborative clinical work we do in caring for patients. To help prepare, we’ve created new QRGs; to help demonstrate how the EMR facilitates comprehensive care.

The ‘EMR and Comprehensive Care’ QRGs are available on the employee resources page and have been created for medical, nursing and midwifery, pharmacy, allied health and administrative employees.

Assessors will likely ask you to show and demonstrate how the EMR facilitates comprehensive care, so please ensure you have read and are familiar with these QRG.

New accreditation checklists

New accreditation checklists are available for doctors, clinicians, non-clinical employees and managers. Many of the actions in the checklists are to be undertaken every day to ensure you continue to deliver safe, timely, effective and person-centred care.

You can find the new checklists here.

Speaking with assessors guide and sample questions and answers

Remember, assessors are not trying to test or trick you. They want to know how we provide patients with safe and effective care. So take the time to talk about the great work you do!

So that you feel prepared when you meet with the assessors in June, we’ve developed a helpful guide, and a series of factsheets covering some of the questions assessors may ask.

The ‘Speaking with Assessors’ guide, as well as factsheets for doctors, clinicians, food service employees and environmental services assistants, are available here.

Partnering with consumers and patient information resources

It’s important to remember that the delivery of safe, timely, effective and person-centred care is only possible by working together with patients, consumers, carers and our community.

At an individual level, that means listening to patients and families, providing them with helpful information and involving them in shared decision-making. At an organisational level, it means involving consumers in our hospitals and community health centres and providing opportunities for them to give us advice and feedback.

In the lead up to accreditation, please familiarise yourself with how we successfully partner with consumers and some of the helpful, patient information we have available for our patients.

Partnering with consumers

You can find consumer advisor brochures on the employee resources page. The partnering with consumers page on our Monash Health website is another fantastic resource for those wanting more information on how we partner with consumers, carers and community members at all levels of our organisation.

Language services

Monash Health Language Services (MHLS) facilitates communication between staff and patients whose preferred language is not English or their primary mode of communication is Auslan/Australian Sign Language.

• Access interpreter services (PROMPT document)
• Access translations services (PROMPT document)
• On-site interpreter booking form

Rights and Responsibilities brochures and translations

Our ‘Rights and Responsibilities’ brochure outlines what patients can expect from us and what we expect from them when they use our services. Find the brochure, as well as translations into 14 languages, on the rights and responsibilities page of the Monash Health website.

Family escalation of care posters and translations

Hospital/site-specific posters and translations can be found on the Family Escalation of Care translations page on the Monash Health website.

Staying safe to prevent falls and pressure injuries

Flyers are available for patients, families and carers about preventing falls and pressure injuries on the employee resources page of the accreditation website.

Patient information

Patient information is available on PROMPT, and via the patient information page of the Monash Health intranet. If you have any questions about patient information resources, please contact patientinfo@monashhealth.org

Events, forums and webinars

Visit the events page on our employee accreditation website for a list of upcoming accreditation-related presentations. You can also watch and download recordings and slide decks from previous events.

Quality Partners are also visiting areas in their program to help with accreditation preparation. Please reach out to your quality partner to organise a visit.

Our Quality Manager for Standards, Audits and PROMPT, Rachel Vogelsang, has been delivering tailored accreditation webinars to teams and departments throughout the organisation. If your team would like to organise an ‘accreditation planning’ session via Webex, please contact us.