Established in 2006 by Director Leith MacMillan, Brisbane-based Day Hospital Consulting offers advice on the development of greenfield private hospitals and healthcare facilities, from feasibility through to commissioning and operations. In the 1990s, Leith was instrumental in developing one of Australia’s first day procedure units in a large private hospital in Brisbane.
Leith has since implemented LogiqcQMS at more than a dozen private day hospitals and healthcare facilities.
Why LogiqcQMS?
As a manager of a facility, I find that strategically and operationally the LogiqcQMS ticks all the boxes to ensure a health facility is being governed. Everything recorded is appropriate to clinical and corporate governance.
Accountability is also a key benefit—I can reassuringly monitor the tasks I’ve given the staff to manage and action. And the LogiqcQMS can produce monthly reports for executive meetings, with clear and concise information on risk management and controls and incidents.
I first reviewed the LogiqcQMS at a conference in 2013 when it was being launched to the day surgery industry. I saw great potential with the product and thought, this will be heaven, especially for the smaller facilities.
Back then, we were still monitoring document control manually with spreadsheets on a shared drive, and it was a nightmare. Staff would save files to a central database with their own file names and we were always unsure where they had saved them to and under what titles.
Also at that time, it was expected that a staff member would be recruited as the ‘Quality Manager’ at a cost of $40,000–$50,000 a year. Implementing the LogiqcQMS eliminates the need for this role. All staff embrace the system and we assign an administrative staff member as the ‘go to’ person and this becomes part of their role.
Overall, the LogiqcQMS is a highly effective and efficient system that is user friendly, easy to navigate and easy to search.
Rolling out LogiqcQMS at a Greenfield day hospital
Day Hospital Consulting has implemented the LogiqcQMS at more than a dozen private day hospitals and healthcare facilities. We promote it because we know it’s going to tick all the boxes and be a solid platform for risk, safety and quality management. With its robust reporting system, it underpins the whole operational management.
For a greenfield site, we roll out the registers gradually, starting with the contact register; the document register allows us to start developing policies and procedures; then, as our list of suppliers grows, we add the supplier register and certificates against the supplier.
As we recruit, staff are educated in the functions of the LogiqcQMS, specifically the accreditation register and the risk register, which are needed for commissioning of the hospital or healthcare facility. This also encourages staff to start analysing risk in the early days of operations.
Quality becomes part of the culture
We make it a condition of employment that all staff are responsible for quality. There is no ‘Quality Manager’. From the cleaner to the top level managers, they all own and talk quality; it’s written into their position descriptions.
It makes a huge difference for staff to have ownership of continual improvement and quality management. At first, we may encounter some resistance, but once they get through that mindset barrier, they embrace it and quality becomes part of everyday work practice and part of the culture of the hospital or healthcare facility.
And everyone speaks the language. With the LogiqcQMS, we build a positive reporting culture where anyone can say, “There’s been an incident. I’ve done this.” We’re human, after all. The hospital or healthcare facility promotes a ‘can do’ culture and the staff focus on making an improvement.
Accreditation a huge benefit of LogiqcQMS
A huge benefit of the LogiqcQMS is when you have a national standards accreditation audit. We give the auditor a login and they can pre-assess remotely. Then they come to site and do their audit in the system where they can use the reporting tools and get all the information they need. They now promote the LogiqcQMS and embrace it because there is accountability, everything is transparent, and it makes their job more streamlined and time-efficient.
The auditors connect with your environment better too because they are actually exploring and finding things rather than you just showing them.
Remote access enables benchmarking across multiple sites
Having remote access to the LogiqcQMS is spectacular, especially when a business has multiple sites. We can manage sites remotely, logging in every morning to assess and monitor the functions and work production.
It also means we can benchmark data across sites; for example, I can see the number of incidents and type of incidents reported at each site and I may be able to pinpoint the reason for differences, such as the physical environment. The system is very enabling.
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