You’re often told you need policies and procedures to drive best practice and underpin quality and consistency. However, many healthcare business owners and leaders struggle with where to start!
Which ones matter most? How do I write them?
Collectively, the various types of documents you create pin down and clarify what is important in your organisation. They take out the guesswork, drive consistency and generate confidence in your team members that they’re doing their jobs well. Identifying the documents that will support these factors will highlight the ones that matter most for you.
At Augmentum, we talk about “documentation”. The primary types of documentation are Policies and Procedures, your working documents like Checklists, Flowcharts and Templates, plus those items you distribute outside your organisation, like Handouts and Reports.
Your Policies set out the principles behind the actions that should be done – they’re the “Why”. Policies don’t have to be lengthy or complex and are better when concise. But they clearly state the principle/s behind the actions needed. All other documentation flows from your Policies and maps out the “Who”, “What”, “When”, “Where” & “How”. Writing your documentation with reference to these points will ensure you cover everything.
We’ve created a Policy and Procedure template to help you get started. The template includes headings and brief explanations of what to cover under these. In this case, we’ve put the Policy and Procedure on the one document, as you’ll often find this works best. We’ve also provided an example, “Quality & Collaboration Policy”, from the same link to see the template in use. Checklists and other docs will also be appropriate to cover details about the “Who”, “What”, “When”, “Where” & “How”.
So, what documentation do you need for YOUR practice?
To map this out, consider the following and start making a list -
What topics or areas do you need to cover to address areas of clinical care in which there’s a need for clear guidelines and consistent processes to facilitate optimal service to clients? These will include things like onboarding and inducting new team members, report templates, consents and client goal establishment and review.
What areas of admin work need clear guidelines and consistent processes to ensure optimal support of your clinicians AND patients/clients? Examples include a client onboarding checklist, a welcome pack and payment guidelines.
What’s needed to embed and drive the Vision & Values of your practice? For example, if “Quality” is one of your Values, how should this be shown by individual team members in their roles, in teams within your practice and in the organisation overall?
What’s needed to meet legal, compliance and accreditation requirements? These cover your HR obligations and things like privacy, IT and incident management.
What will underpin performance – both staff and financial? Examples include position descriptions, performance appraisals, financial reports, budgets and decision tools.
If you’re seeking accreditation with a governing body, there’ll be specific documentation that you’ll need, and the relevant body will generally be quite explicit about these requirements. For example, if you’re seeking accreditation under the NDIS, specific documentation required will be based on your registration groups, the services and supports that you provide, and whether you require verification or certification. Your initial Scope of Audit will help determine what’s needed.
However, we can’t stress strongly enough that the purpose of creating documentation should not be solely to gain accreditation or to cover you for problems/issues that might arise. Having the right documents in place has many significant positive impacts on your service quality, team motivation, client retention, managerial burden and stress levels – to name just a few!
Achievement of these ends assumes that your documentation has been well researched, written and tested, well communicated, and well embedded in the culture and day-to-day of your organisation. It’s easy to get caught up in creating documents and forget about rolling them out to the team, checking understanding and ensuring they’re using them. A plan to make this happen for each document or set of related documents will help you achieve the full gains you’re after.
A final tip…
Getting your team members involved from the outset will help, too. They’ll have ideas about what’s needed from their role’s perspective, plus be able to write, proof and test some documents. Also, getting their early input will help gain buy-in and then with embedding the inevitable changes that will come.
Download your Policy & Procedure template and example Quality & Collaboration Policy through our Downloadable Resources page.
The Augmentum team provides a broad range of consultancy and management services, supporting healthcare business owners and decision-makers in many key areas, such as strategy development and action planning, building effective foundations and teams, keeping your finger on the pulse, and driving growth and success.
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