Quality Care

Patient safety is the cornerstone of high-quality healthcare. This means that at SMMC everything is done to prevent patients from having any injuries, accidents, and infections during their care at the hospital. 

To realize high quality and safe care, the hospital is required to have and develop protocols and guidelines for all their medical procedures. These guidelines are used by doctors and nurses to give the best possible care. Additionally, regarding quality and safety the use of checklists by the staff is also a necessity. These are used as an evaluation tool, and helps standardize the care to provide consistent high quality care. 

Patient safety also means we monitor all activities and check all the processes related to the hospital. For this, questions are asked such as:

• Is everything up-to-date? 
• Do we need to implement changes?  
• Are new developments possible that would make our processes faster and safer, so that fewer errors can/will occur? 

Questioning our processes allows us to continuously improve our activities in the best interest of our patients. We do our best to prevent errors. However, if there is an error, the organization makes sure that the chance of that error ever happening again is minimalized. 

Our quality management is making sure that everything in the hospital occurs in the most efficient and safest way possible. Everything we do in quality management, we do according to the Deming circle. 

This system stipulates that it is not enough to simply make an improvement plan. Rather, there must also be checks done regularly to determine if the devised plan is working. Additionally, once the plan is working, a strategy needs to be established to specify how improvements can be made to the plan and the organization’s operations to make it even better.  

Part of quality and safety at SMMC also relates to making sure that the patients are satisfied. Patient Satisfaction surveys have been used for this. In these surveys patients are asked for their opinions and whether they have any recommendations for the hospital. The data is then analyzed, so we can improve our healthcare provision and make their stay more pleasant. 

Overall, patient safety at SMMC is about ensuring the virtual absence of the likelihood that physical and/ or psychological harm happens to the patient through the lack of professional standards of workers and/or failings in the healthcare system.