The best software for quality and risk management.In June 2021, Qualicor Europe conducted an audit at Ikazia Hospital Rotterdam. Ikazia passed the audit with flying colours and Qualicor gave a nice compliment for the way they use Zenya as a quality and risk management system. We’d like to know more about that.
So it was time to talk to Inge van Wagtendonk, Head of Quality and Patient Safety, and Laszlo Leensvaart, Staff Member for Quality and Patient Safety and Qualicor Europe accreditation project leader.
Ikazia is committed to a process of continuous improvement. They want to achieve this in various ways, for example by learning from (incident) reports, promoting cooperation between departments and ensuring overview and insight. For this, they use Zenya’s four modules.
“We switched to Zenya since September 2021. The launch of Zenya, which was going to replace iProva with us as well, fell just before the Qualicor audit and we didn’t think it was convenient to have the two at the same time. So we waited until after the audit and then switched,” says Inge.
“We kept the communication around the change low key: after all, little has changed in terms of content. That has worked, as we haven’t had any comments about functionality. Everything is running as it always did,” continues Inge.
With Zenya, the peak around an audit should disappear and quality can become a continuous process.”
Not so long ago, Zenya was mainly used by Ikazia to meet standards. Around an audit, therefore, there was always a spike in activities touching quality and safety. This required a certain way of thinking, with Zenya mainly being used for quality assurance. Ikazia wanted to change this.
Not only Inge and Laszlo’s department should feel responsible for quality; quality assurance should become more part of practice/work on the shop floor. For example, by giving managers and team leaders easy insight with smart dashboards in Zenya. This should also eliminate the peak around an audit and allow quality to become a continuous process.
Ikazia sees the need for a change, but Qualicor’s methodology has also recently changed to reflect this very fact. From one audit every four years, where many documents have to be provided in advance and 2,500 standards are questioned, a cycle now takes five years. During those five years, a less extensive audit on one of the components takes place every 20 months. This should lead to more continuity in quality and less burden around an audit.
We want to involve everyone in the organisation in this process and Zenya is helping us to do that.”
Inge says they notice that it is alive and well within the organisation: “We have a director of patient care who regularly looks into Zenya. He really tries to keep up with the state of quality within Ikazia using the dashboards, what is going well but also what could be improved.
We see that he also likes to log in in the evenings and occasionally asks questions about where to find certain things. That involvement is great to see and that’s what we do it for in the end. We want to involve everyone in the organisation in this process and Zenya is helping us to do that.”
For an audit like Qualicor’s, it is important to make it clear that quality is a continuous process throughout the organisation. They measure
this partly by asking employees questions about protocols, processes and guidelines. By making Zenya part of daily work within Ikazia, this is easy to measure.
Indeed, Qualicor explicitly mentions the use of Zenya within Ikazia in the evaluation: “Clear dashboards for all layers in the organisation and everything under one umbrella.” We couldn’t get a nicer compliment at Infoland, because after all, this is what we do it for.
Ikazia is also happy with such a comment, because it means that they made the right choice in working with Zenya, and that employees not only show desirable behaviour during an audit but that quality really lives.
So is there nothing left to wish for? Of course there is. Safety and quality, we said earlier, is a continuous process. Standing still also means going backwards in this case.
Laszlo speaks highly of Zenya’s flexibility: “We can build almost anything we want, from notification forms to dashboards. The possibilities are there. What else would I like? I can name just one thing: the ability to easily show cross-links, e.g. between different departments, in reports. This would allow us to recognise trends in learning ability and lessons learned and pick this up organisation-wide instead of per team or department.”
We are also looking at the possibilities of making transmural reporting easier within the Rotterdam region. Almost all Ikazia’s partners use Zenya so the possibilities are there. “Then quality and safety becomes not only our own responsibility anymore but we can also start making external steps in cooperation,” Laszlo concludes.
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