Hospice evolves its QMS with its practice

Hummingbird House is Queensland’s only children’s hospice. Established in 2016, it provides short-break stays, family support services, creative therapies, and care at the end of life for children with life-limiting conditions and their families. While not for profit, it is a licensed private hospital and a medically supported ‘home away from home’ where kids can be kids, families can reconnect, and precious memories can be created.

Bodene Dingwall joined Hummingbird House shortly after the organisation went live with LogiqcQMS. 

National standards to meet

As a licensed private hospital, Hummingbird House is assessed against the National Safety and Quality Health Service Standards. To help us get accredited initially, management had hired a consultant, who established Logiqc as our QMS. As the need for a quality lead became apparent, I stepped into that role.

Hummingbird House uses LogiqcQMS for document control and quality improvement. We have about 70 staff (including our casual workforce), primarily clinical, and everyone has access, at varying levels. It is important that the whole team has access to all our policies and procedures, as well as the ability to record improvements, incidents and feedback.

Implementing LogiqcQMS

Being a new organisation, our implementation of the QMS has been an evolution, just as we have evolved our practice.

In early 2020, we upgraded to Logiqc’s cloud-based platform and have embraced the service and functionality. The upgrade process was very clear, the migration was quite simple, and we were operational within a matter of hours.

The Logiqc team were very responsive, ironing out the kinks and taking our feedback on board. They ran training sessions on the new elements for everyone—volunteers, clinical staff, kitchen staff. It’s quite ‘follow your nose’.

Accreditation is ‘the big winner’

As a small team, the main benefit to us is that LogiqcQMS is an all-encompassing platform that is able to house everything we need, from version control, to incidents and improvements, and accreditation. It’s such a good all-round system.

Accreditation—that’s the big winner for me. Once you link the required evidence to the accreditation module, you have live updates, so you always have the most current version.

And with everything in one spot, it’s a lot easier to compile the information that assessors need. We can provide assessors with access to the system and give them an evidence report before they even arrive.

As a new organisation, our assessments were more regular than the normal 3-year cycle and it was extraordinarily helpful to have Logiqc keep everything in one easy-to-access location.