AHMRC provides support and a range of resources to ACCHO Member organisations throughout NSW to achieve and maintain safety, quality improvement processes to achieve and maintain accreditation status. This is in accordance with applicable standards including health service, whole-of-organisation accreditation, or certification and other relevant to community services operating within NSW.
This includes promoting accreditation, supporting organisations to develop and implement relevant business systems and to integrate accreditation with broader service delivery activities.
What is Accreditation?
Accreditation is used in various Aboriginal Health and Community sectors to ensure that organisations meet a set of standards relevant to the programs or services they deliver. It involves the organisation being reviewed by an external team to assess the extent to which it has met an approved set of standards. External accreditation is a vital means by which a health and community service can demonstrate to its patients, clients, board, and community that its services are safe and of high quality, that it has effective systems for important areas, such as risk management, and that it is actively committed to quality improvements. Achieving accreditation means that your service has been assessed as having reached defined standards of excellence in safety and quality in primary healthcare.
Accreditation:
- Requires meeting defined criteria or Standards.
- Measures and improves performance outcomes.
- Assures quality and performance for owners, operators, managers, staff, funding bodies and consumers.
- Helps to drive continuous improvement and best practice at a health and community sector level.
This provides:
- Independent recognition that our organisations and services meet the requirements of defined criteria and standards.
- Assurance to services operators, managers, staff, funding bodies and consumers about the quality of our performance and service delivery.
Key benefits of accreditation:
- Promoting the quality and safety of the care and service provided to consumers of the service2.
- Giving consumers and the community confidence in the service being delivered
- Educating and engaging staff in the provision of quality care and services4
- Creating a culture of quality within the service environments
- Enhancing consumer focus by responding to feedback and expectations
- Reducing overall business risks
- A structured way to evidence compliance with regulatory requirements.
An approach to accreditation is guided by five principles. These five guiding principles underlying the provision of quality accreditation services are:
- Excellence
- Simplicity
- Support
- Independence
- Expertise
Training and Support
AHMRC supports our member services to achieve accreditation against specific, standards frameworks relevant to their organisation. This is in accordance with applicable standards including health service, whole-of-organisation accreditation, or certification and other relevant to community services operating within NSW.
This includes promoting accreditation, supporting organisations to develop and implement relevant business systems and to integrate accreditation with broader service delivery activities.
We encourage our members to contact us to arrange a site visit. During the visit, we will discuss how we can support your organization in developing and implementing relevant business systems, and integrating accreditation with broader service delivery activities.
- The site visit will be conducted by a team of experts who have experience in helping organizations improve their business systems and processes.
- The site visit will be tailored to the specific needs of your organization.
- The site visit will provide you with an opportunity to get feedback on your current systems and processes, and to learn about new and innovative ways to improve them.
To achieve this, AH&MRC organises trainings for their member services in association with AGPAL(https://www.agpal.com.au/) and QIP https://www.qip.com.au/ .
The 2-day CQI Accreditation Self-Assessment workshop is provided by Quality Innovation Performance Limited (QIP). QIP is a leading provider of CQI training and consultancy services. The education and training team at QIP works collaboratively with stakeholders and clients to co-develop and deliver high-quality training packages that are fit for purpose and consistently meet the clients’ desired learning objectives.
The workshop is designed to help organizations achieve CQI accreditation by providing participants with the knowledge and skills they need to conduct CQI within their organization.
Past workshops:
AH&MRC facilitated 2-day training sessions on Accreditation self-assessment in collaboration with AGPAL in Sydney, Dubbo and Coffs Harbour. Total of 53 AMS staff from 19 Member Services attended these workshops.
Please contact our Accreditation team to know more about these trainings. We keep our members informed about upcoming training opportunities through email and social media. To stay up-to-date on the latest training offerings, be sure to subscribe to our email list and follow us on social media.
