National Healthcare Group Polyclinics Singapore
National Healthcare Group Polyclinics (NHGP) is a full-service primary health care provider and the first public health care group in the Republic of Singapore to attain JCI accreditation. As part of the National Healthcare Group Cluster, NHGP manages nine polyclinics, serving 20% of the primary care needs of Singapore’s citizens. NHGP focuses on disease prevention, health promotion, chronic disease management and treatment of acute medical conditions.
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Situation
According to Joanna Chia, manager of the Quality Management Office for NHGP, her organization has a philosophy of continuous improvement, and sought JCI accreditation to gain a “holistic review” of the many facets of care delivery. “The JCI Ambulatory Care standards provided the framework to strengthen our patient care processes and the management structure required to sustain excellence in these standards of care.”
Results
Greater focus on analyzing data and tracking improvements was a direct result of the JCI accreditation process. “Through data tracking and process improvements, we noticed that diabetes control, one of our key indicators for chronic disease management, has shown good improvement,” says Ms. Chia. “HBA1c < 7% has improved with diabetic patients from 32% to 46%. Through this process, leaders are more willing to look at data and to discuss problems and effective improvements based on data.”
Increased staff compliance with hand hygiene guidelines is another area in which NHGP sustained improvements. “Through the preparation process, we focused on promoting awareness of and compliance to hand hygiene,” says Ms. Chia. “It led us to study the guidelines. We learned that alcohol hand rub was just as effective in most situations in our setting as antiseptic hand wash. This change helped us to gain greater staff compliance as they found it difficult to wash their hands before and after every patient contact.”
Another gain was the multidisciplinary team formed to understand different perspectives on care delivery and identify gaps in the continuity of care. According to Ms. Chia, “Teamwork was built in the preparation process for the survey with everyone focused on the common goal. Although there was some resistance, many staff gave positive feedback about JCI accreditation being a worthwhile endeavor.”
Most of all, Ms Chia believes that being a JCI-accredited organization will fortify the community’s trust in NHGP because it has resulted in “greater clarity of the definition of good quality care to our patients.” She also adds that the preparation process helped NHGP “to define the service we are delivering, the stakeholders, and the equipment necessary to deliver the care. We uncovered many areas for improvement, addressed them systematically, created policies and procedures to guide us and worked to embed these improvements in our work processes.”
