Perley Health: Demonstrating compliance audit through Tendable

Introduction:

Perley  Health is a unique and innovative community that empowers Seniors and Veterans to live life to the fullest. Home to more than 600 Seniors and Veterans in long-term care and in independent apartments, Perley Health provides a growing number of clinical, therapeutic and recreational services to residents, tenants and people from across the region.

One of the largest and most progressive long-term care homes in Ontario, Perley Health is also a centre for research, education, and clinical innovation. Our Centre of Excellence in Frailty-Informed Care conducts and shares the practical research needed to improve care. Future caregivers come here to study and to acquire hands-on skills and experience.

Perley Health's values are brought to life each day by our over 800 employees. And more than 400 regular volunteers connect us closely with the community. Together, we improve the well-being of Canada's aging population.

Challenge:

Perley Health care for some of Canada's most vulnerable people. Therefore, they must ensure that they are held to a high standard through their regular compliance audits. With the ministry of long-term care determined to ensure continuous quality improvement and assurance is achieved across Canada. Perley are working to consistently monitor quality to ensure they’re not taking their foot off the gas.

Several challenges are evident when dealing with standards and compliance audits in long-term care. Here are the key challenges they face:

Maintaining Consistency with Standards

With ever-evolving guidelines, it is difficult to ensure all standards are consistently met across all areas. As well as, preparing for frequent audits from the ministry can be resource-intensive and stressful. The need for ongoing monitoring to ensure compliance can lead to staff fatigue and complacency. ‍

‍Lack of resources

It is often difficult to conduct your quality inspection cycle without the allocation of sufficient resources (time, personnel, finances) to compliance activities without compromising other areas of care. Maintaining accurate and comprehensive records that meet audit requirements is time consuming.‍

Communication and Training

Another challenge has always been to ensure all staff are aware of and understand compliance standards and procedures that ever-changing within the healthcare and social care industry. The team at Perley struggled to keep up with frequent changes in regulations and standards from the ministry long-term care.
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How we work together:

The time-saving unlocked at Perley Health from using Tendable across such a varied workforce has meant that staff are able to spend more time caring for their residents, instead of burning out in administration tasks.

We are now able to evidence a complete compliance over time, as well as highlighting areas of potential improvement within their current healthcare processes to regulatory authorities. Critical quality initiatives such as infection prevention and control (IPAC) have also been digitised.

The guidance feature allows us to ensure we are following the correct steps to ensure that PPE is kept as clean as possible before entering a room, and then when before leaving a room that they're removing it appropriately so that they're not potentially putting themselves at risk.

We are deeply committed to quality improvement here at Perley and part of that is making sure again, that we're consistently measuring, measuring against that. As long-term care is a highly regulated environment and with good reason.

So whether you are a staff member at the bedside and you're completing a room audit, whether you're a manager and you're evaluating against a standard, say in preparation for accreditation or a compliance audit, or whether you're somebody like me who sits in an office and you're running reports and you know you're looking at performance across the organisation, the tool is really easy to use. It's customisable, and it's feasible in a long-term care environment where resources are often tight and stretched.

With over 1000 inspections completed by Perley Health since March, we are now expanding out to first aid, kit checks and nutrition.