Dr Patrick Meaney and Associates are very pleased to announce that we are now a QIP Accredited Practice.
Quality Innovation Performance (QIP) was chosen by the Australian Dental Association to provide independent assessment for dental practices. After we demonstrated that we meet that all standards, we were very pleased to be awarded Accreditation. QIP is a Brisbane based company that supports improvement for health care and allied health care providers The core vision of QIP is “Make it Better”, something Moss Vale Dental does every day.
We wanted to check all of our operating procedures and policies to find if there were ways that we could improve our standards of service. Independent accreditation means that we are recognised as meeting governing industry standards. It also formalises our commitment to providing safe and quality service through best practice, high performing systems and continuous improvement.
So how did we actually achieve this? The process is undertaken in-house over many months. The ADA NSW in particular is dedicated to improving the profession and sees Practice Accreditation as a fantastic way of getting dental practices to adopt ‘best practice’ in modern dental care. The team at ADA NSW used a support system to get us started and guide us along the way. They created a 12-week program that gave us set of goals for each week. We used this guideline and found the framework incredibly helpful.
It was then a process of validating our System of Governance and solidifying our Mission and Practice Values. It was really interesting to formalise into words key areas of what we are hoping to achieve. Luckily, we had most of our systems in place and it was a case of tweaking documents and collating registers into a more coherent group of files and tables. We looked at all areas of the practice from consumer service, human resources, infection control, escalation of care, medication safety, patient identification and procedure matching.
In each area we were required to submit evidence of how we were making these ideas into reality on a daily basis. It was a very involved process that required us to re-examine everything we do to ensure we meet or exceed expected standards of care. We were happy to learn that we could say in most cases, “we already do that”. It was also great to have the opportunity to look at processes with fresh eyes and in some cases say “we could improve that” or “that’s something we could try”.
Once we had our evidence together, we submitted the results to the review panel at QIP and endured a nail-biting wait for a couple of weeks until the email arrived with the news we’d been successful. However, the story doesn’t end there. Once accredited, a practice needs to maintain the standards and show evidence of this in order to be re accredited in two years’ time.
Although the process was quite challenging, we are really proud to now officially be an accredited practice. You can rest assured that we are doing everything we can to achieve the best possible outcomes for our patients.
