Joint Commission International (JCI), a healthcare accreditation body that has given its stamp of approval to more than 200 hospitals in 27 countries, recently launched a quality and safety improvement framework aimed at helping healthcare organisations, government agencies and ministries of health worldwide to achieve new levels in quality patient care.
Joint Commission International (JCI), a healthcare accreditation body that has given its stamp of approval to more than 200 hospitals in 27 countries, recently launched a quality and safety improvement framework aimed at helping healthcare organisations, government agencies and ministries of health worldwide to achieve new levels in quality patient care.
Called the “JCI International Essentials of Health Care Quality and Patient Safety”, the framework is designed to help organisations focus on five risk areas that have the greatest impact on improving healthcare quality and patient safety.
The five risk areas are:
• Leadership Process and Accountability
• Competent and Capable Workforce
• Safe Environment for Staff and Patients
• Clinical Care of Patients
• Improving Quality and Safety
The JCI Essentials provide clear and achievable risk reduction expectations. Levels of effort are identified for each criterion to provide a means for evaluating progress in reducing risk and improving quality.
“Increasingly, JCI has been asked to provide assistance to organisations and countries that are focusing on the foundational elements of quality and safety, which may eventually serve as a step toward national or international accreditation,” said JCI chief executive Karen H Timmons.
She explained: “The Essentials methodology for improving quality and safety is an accumulation of the knowledge necessary to achieve the level of healthcare safety and quality that meets the needs of all stakeholders. JCI recognises that healthcare organisations around the world are called upon to provide high quality, safe patient care despite limited financial and human resources. The Essentials framework aims to help organisations focus on the safety risk areas that will have the highest impact on patient safety. The mission of JCI is to improve the quality and safety of health care globally, and by offering the Essentials framework, we are now able to more efficiently assist healthcare organisations to higher quality care.”
JCI Essential received ISQua endorsement in early in 2008. ISQua, or the International Society for Quality in Health Care, is a non-profit, independent organisation with members in over 70 countries. ISQua works to provide services to guide health professionals, providers, researchers, agencies, policy makers and consumers, to achieve excellence in healthcare delivery to all people, and to continuously improve the quality and safety of care.
While JCI is the numerical market leader in individual hospital accreditation, it has seen all four of its main rivals get involved with countries on country –wide accreditations. Essentials is a tool to get more lucrative country based business.
As part of the Essentials program launch, Mexico is the first country to demonstrate this product to other countries internationally.
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