When did quality management become such an industry? We know only too well that today we're surrounded by requirements and regulations which force us to take an active approach to what is generally known as quality management. There is even a Chartered Quality Institute (CQI - not to be confused with the CQC) representing people who work in the quality industry. If you feel that the quality circus has only recently come to town to beleaguer the benighted dental business owner or manager you may (as I was) be surprised to learn that the CQI was founded as long ago as 1919. It seems that the concepts of quality as we understand them today have in fact been around for longer than we might think.
Of course there is a whole language involved in the quality business, although the term 'quality' is still often used in a rather vague way. Even the term 'quality management' doesn't aim to assure 'good quality' but rather to ensure that a practice is consistent in the way it goes about providing its service to its patients and clients. For most right minded professionals, quality management is basically about improving what we do and the way that we do. However to get to that point of improvement we do need to consider the twin peaks of quality control and quality assurance.
Quality management in a dental practice is ideally thought of as a practice-wide approach that everyone gets involved in to understanding precisely what our patients seek, and delivering this to them consistently within our determined budgets and timescales. Most of us also buy the idea that quality is about learning what we are doing well and improving it, and (and this is often the more uncomfortable bit) that it also means finding out what we may need to change in order to respond better to our patients' requirements. After all quality, rather like beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What exactly do our patients see and perceive?
This is all well and good but isn't it part of being a professional? Surely most of us see this as a natural part of running a successful practice and professional responsibility? Unfortunately even though this may be true we now as a profession have standards imposed on us through the CQC and other regulatory bodies (including the NHS and the GDC). That's not to mention other quality standards we may have voluntarily engaged with such as Investors in People and the BDA Good Practice scheme. As compliance becomes more and more complicated and the consequences of non compliance more draconian, more things can go wrong. A forgotten check on a licence or a registration could have serious financial repercussions for your practice. It is this concern which in some ways is anathema to the real focus of quality - improvement. Many dentists and managers are finding it so time consuming just trying to keep up with everything that the improvements - if they get thought about – can get overlooked in favour of compliance and the relief of another audit completed.
Whatever the size of your practice you need a quality assurance system – some form of practical management system which you can use to strengthen and improve your practice and make sure that the right things get done when they are supposed to. A good system should clearly set out the expectations that the practice should meet and also help you to raise standards of work by having reviews built in as well as making sure everything is done consistently.
At CODE we understand that dental practices need a helping hand to get to grips with quality assurance and quality management in their practices and that it is simply not feasible for most practices to have a dedicated person just looking at quality. We know too that most practices consider that the responsibility for ensuring quality lies at the door of everyone working there. To make life easier, CODE is launching a new service called iCOMPLY to give practices an easy- to- use solution with compliance and CQC requirements. As it is a Cloud based service you can access policies, procedures, risk assessments and other useful tools and files with a web browser on your PC or tablet. To make things even simpler, it is based on a calendar/scheduler to remind you of all the tasks that need to be done to maintain your compliance. Your team members can even have their activity reminders by email or on their own dashboard.
We know that it can be easy to forget some of those important but non-urgent tasks, and so this new system will remind you to perform those essential compliance activities such as risk assessments, audits, practice meetings and appraisals with reminders for general tasks such checking the professional indemnity of your team or whether you have renewed your TV licence.Perhaps the greatest advantage of the application is its flexibility. It allows you to take control, so you can change what you do and how you do it, then it remembers your way. This means that you can get on with the important job of treating patients and focusing on the real business of quality management - which is to improve your patients' experience and your practice.