Potchefstroom Hospital recently received a compliance certificate which will assist the facility to achieve full accreditation from the Office of Health Standards Compliance (OHSC) with overall excellent achievement.

This follows the OHSC Re-Inspection that was undertaken on 27 February 2024 where the hospital was re-inspected for compliance in terms of patient care provision and the expectations from the community and all relevant stakeholders. The hospital can confirm that the certificate of compliance will be assessed in the next five years.

The Potchefstroom Hospital Acting Chief Executive Officer, Dr. Michael Shakung said that the facility strives to provide patients with high-quality and safe healthcare services.

“Accreditation is one of the most powerful symbols of a healthcare organisation’s commitment to provide high-quality and safe healthcare services, continuous improvement services across all aspects of patient care and patient safety, using the benchmarks associated with global best practices. Accreditation is regarded as a basis of the safety and quality programmes of many healthcare systems. It is based on the application of nationally- and internationally-agreed standards for assessing and benchmarking the performance of the facilities, whether hospitals or clinics,” said Dr. Shakung.

The benefits of accreditation processes are multiple and include among others: improved quality and safety of care; explicit, documented processes; effective teamwork; reduced costs and enhanced organisational cultures. In other words, accreditation is a process that drives the full scope of improvement which necessarily encompasses the structures, processes and outcomes of service delivery. This also indicates that the award of full accreditation status reflects high individual and organisational performance.

Accreditation came about as a result of a baseline performance audit and gap analysis study that was conducted in hospitals during the end of 2022/23 financial year where several deficiencies in relation to the quality and safety of health services provided were identified.

The accreditation process incorporates the development of a quality improvement system which will ensure that continuous quality improvement becomes an essential part of the activities of this health establishment.

“This was not an easy journey although the hospital knew exactly what was required of it. We had many challenges; there was lots of anxiety from some colleagues. It was up to management to ensure that the preparations unfold as planned. With ownership of the programme by management, change was gradually accepted and an understanding of the improvement process was gained by many,” said Dr. Shakung.

There are service areas commonly known as service elements and each was expected to produce evidence as to how they provide care to their customers. Policies and standard operating procedures had to be developed and continuous documentation as well as monitoring of their implementation and the outcomes. Everything was about quality and evidence of how one performed a particular procedure. The facility did not just sit back; it took the re-inspection as a priority because it wanted its services to be recognised by others.

The recognition and appreciation of this achievement by all relevant stakeholders should provide Potchefstroom Hospital with momentum to perform even better. This will result with increased utilisation of healthcare services; increased community awareness on the performance of the hospital and a competitive edge where this hospital will now become a health facility of choice.

Furthermore, this accreditation presents a challenge and the hospital will continue to be tested in many different ways. The ways it responds to those challenges will have an impact on the reputation of the quality and safety of the healthcare services it provides.

Healthcare is dynamic and the team should continually be innovative to adapt new technologies and better modernised methods of providing care that is responsive to the health needs of the community it serves. There are no excuses for any substandard work, and it is up to the entire hospital to uphold what it has achieved.