Our most important quality improvement project in 2020 was preparing for introducing an international quality system compliant with the criteria of Joint Commission International (JCI).
JCI is the world’s largest hospital accreditation system. Six of our departments were involved in the first stage of this project: Perioperative, Intensive Care and Pain Medicine, Children and Adolescents, Gynecology and Obstetrics, the Head and Neck Center, Psychiatry, and the Comprehensive Cancer Center. Many of our support service personnel were also involved. Our aim is for the JCI audits for these six departments to begin in 2021. At the same time, the project will be extended to cover all of HUS.
What is JCI?
JCI is a highly patient-oriented and comprehensive international quality system that covers all our functions and occupational groups and also provides a foundation for self-monitoring. The system will guide us to listen to our patients better and will serve as the cornerstone of our quality control. Our project is being managed and coordinated by the Quality ad Patient Safety Unit (LAAPO) headed by Chief Quality Officer Sanna-Maria Kivivuori.
Our collaboration with Mount Sinai Hospital in the USA has continued in the form of virtual meetings. Mount Sinai Hospital is a quality hospital that mentors and supports HUS in our quality efforts. The visit from Mount Sinai to HUS that was organized in the previous year resulted in a thorough report on points to improve.
Having an international quality system improves the quality of an organization not just through quality criteria but also with metrics and auditing. We have set up multidiscipline working groups for reviewing the JCI quality criteria and have devised the HUS set of indicators to measure the eight dimensions of quality. The basic concept with quality indicators is that there should be as few indicators as possible, they should be monitored frequently, and above all action should be taken to improve the metrics. JCI auditing involves a quality monitoring method, Trace Rounds. The purpose of Tracer Rounds is to work with employees in a unit to find ways to improve quality. Due to the coronavirus situation, we suspended Tracer Rounds at times in 2020.
The quality system selected for HUS is patient-oriented and guides us to listen more closely to patients.