Quality Improvement/Risk Management

Quality Improvement & Risk Managment Committee

The Quality Improvement and Risk Management Committee is accountable to the Board of Directors advising on quality improvement and risk management issues.  This responsibility includes recommending and supporting Coast’s Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) initiatives, including Risk Management.

Our primary thrust over the past year was to ensure that the organization was prepared for accreditation in May of this year.  We spent a lot of time looking at our reporting to the Board and totally re-vamped our scorecard to link with the themes coming out of the new strategic plan.  As well when we met with managers and staff our focus was to determine how they were using the information collected to improve their services.

The committee also looked at our options regarding accreditation bodies as the new approach and standards of Accreditation Canada seemed to be geared more for acute care settings rather than community based services.  A decision was made to continue with Accreditation Canada for this survey as we did not feel the timing was right to change and we did not want to negatively impact the organization or the results of the survey.  Although we have not received the final report from the survey in May our preliminary feedback from the surveyors of Accreditation Canada was quite favorable and staff was quite pleased with the quality of the survey and the surveyors themselves.

Achievements and work in progress include:

• Reviewed Committee Terms of Reference
• Established Goals and Objectives for the Committee
• Continued to refine the Balanced Scorecard quality information and report results to the board on a regular basis.
• Reviewed critical incidents to ensure procedures were followed and that if steps needed to be taken to improve procedures or prevent problems from occurring they were implemented.
• Progress on the majority of the goals and objectives established for 2008/09
• Once report from survey is received work will begin on addressing any concerns

Goals for the coming year continue to be the establishment of a culture of quality at Coast as well as the refinement of the CQI and Risk Management system.

Members of Quality Improvement Risk Management Committee: Margaret Perry (Chair), Peter Ng, Peter Gibson, John Higenbottam, Pat Zanon,

Resource Staff: Darrell Burnham, Carolyn Hampton, Rhonda Rector, Renay Bajkay, Tracy Schonfeld