Over the years, the Jan Yperman Hospital has developed a hospital-wide quality policy. The emphasis lies on continuous improvements and safeguarding the care processes in the hospital.
Quality care has a central place in the mission of the Jan Yperman Hospital.
Putting this into practice every day and living up to it on the floor is not an easy task. Our employees are crucial to achieving the organisation's goals.
Quality care is defined by the Institute of Medicine as: safe effective, efficient, patient-centred, timely and equitable. At the Jan Yperman hospital, these quality elements are put into practice daily to achieve the goal that unites us all offering the best possible care to every patient every day.
An important part of quality assurance is patient safety.
If you want to express a compliment, suggestion, comment, complaint or medical/patient safety incident, you can contact the ombuds service, which is responsible for handling and recording these matters.
In order to raise the quality of care and patient safety to an even higher level, the Jan Yperman Hospital organises periodic audits on its own initiative. The internal audit team consists of quality staff who together check the unit’s performance against an existing benchmark.
The set of standards used for this purpose include various guidelines from various governments, supplemented by guidelines chosen by the organisation itself. The quality standards are tested in all the hospital areas. Employees are approached by the auditors according to the principles: ‘approach the place where the care or the process takes place as closely as you can’ and ‘the patient comes always first’.
For example, standards concerning surgery are checked in the operating theatre; standards concerning medication are checked during the usual medication rounds; standards concerning infection prevention and hospital hygiene are checked during patient care on the wards.
In this way, the hospital obtains a reliable picture of the current high quality of care and points for improvement become clearly visible.
Care in the JYZ is mapped according to the quality indicators of the Flemish Institute for Quality and Care, with effective numbers. In this way, we can objectively demonstrate that we are providing good care and see what needs to be adjusted.
The indicators and results for the JYZ are published on the website of quality of care.
The Jan Yperman has twice achieved the Joint Commission International (JCI) accreditation label. In 2020, the organisation decided to abandon the system of an external foreign audit. In a number of areas, the framework of requirements did not sufficiently correspond to the Flemish reality. Alternatively, the hospital will develop its own quality model and specific indicators. Here too, the starting point is the existing framework of requirements of various governments and other care institutions. A programme of internal and external review will monitor this process.
A records audit is used to check whether the questioning about pain is systematically registered. After further training and information to management, we succeeded in finding the registration for 80% of the admissions.
Dirk Vanrenterghem - quality coordinator: 057 35 70 45
