Patient Safety & Quality

A Culture of Safety and Quality of care

Our hospitals have a long standing and visible commitment to patient safety and quality of care; a culture that is evident from the boardroom to the bedside. All of our member hospitals are inspected and assessed against regulatory or quality standards relevant to their area of practice by organisations such as The Mental Health Commission, Joint Commission International (JCI) and CHKS.

Members have also voluntarily adopted the Health Information and Quality Authority (HIQA) standards, against which they rigorously self-assess, to ensure that patients benefit from any related quality enhancements, in anticipation of the extension of HIQA’s regulatory remit to include private hospitals. The hospitals also comply with any applicable statutory regulations such as those relating to Health and Safety, Infection Prevention & Control, Fire Safety and Medication Management.

The PHA facilitates quality benchmarking across member hospitals to support continuous quality improvement and the sharing of best practice. Our Patient Safety and Quality Assurance committee members, comprising of the Quality/Best Practice Managers from each private hospital, meet quarterly to collectively and proactively ensure that our member hospitals are practising in line with national and international best practice standards for patient care. The Quality/Best Practice Managers are members of the Senior Management Teams in their respective hospitals and, along with their CEOs and Directors of Nursing, ensure that Quality and Patient Safety is a priority at the highest level of governance.

The hospitals excel at providing evidence based care and members represent the Association at various national working groups and programmes and contribute to National Policy and Guidelines. The hospitals actively support and encourage learning and development amongst clinicians and staff through formal and experiential learning and this culture of lifelong learning ensures that patients are cared for by highly educated and motivated teams.

Our member hospitals strongly advocate a collaborative practice approach to patient safety and readily share learning from quality improvement opportunities in individual hospitals. Hospitals use evidence based risk management methodologies and employ experts to educate staff and promote patient safety initiatives. Many of the hospitals have patient representatives (former patients) involved in their patient safety committees and find their feedback from a patient’s perspective invaluable. All of the hospitals hold events to promote public awareness of patient safety, and highlight the importance of handwashing by all patients, visitors and staff in hospitals as one of the most simple and effective patient safety initiatives of our time.