They guide day-to-day activities, helping promote consistency in practices, reduce mistakes, and keep patients and staff safe. Healthcare workers regularly deal with life-or-death scenarios. Having the proper procedures in place helps them make good decisions and provide the best possible care to patients.
Well written policies and procedures also protect your organization. They manage and mitigate risks by laying out procedures in detail. If an incident were to result in a lawsuit, policies and procedures minimize liability by showing that your organization had proper processes in place. Learn more about healthcare policy and procedure management in this free guide. Writing policies and procedures in healthcare is tricky. There are so many different areas and tasks to cover — everything from patient care, to billing, to data security.
Before you begin the writing process , set yourself up for success by taking a look at your current policies and laying the groundwork for a consistent, organized policy handbook. First, try to get a broad overview of the current state of policy in your organization.
What policies do exist? When was the last time they were updated? Do they line up with current technology and practices? Are they consistent with other policies? What policies are you missing? Having contradictory, unorganized policies is not much better than having no policies at all. As you do this, make a list of the policies that need to be updated first.
Policies that cover common practices, high-risk tasks, and areas regulated by law should take first priority. The content of your policies matters more than how they look. But having a standard, well-organized policy structure helps make policies easier for employees to navigate. Creating a standard format for your policies will help with consistency and ensure you include all the necessary information in each policy.
It will make it easier to organize your policies and keep track of when they were last updated and what they cover. Use a policy management software like PowerDMS to create and update your policy template.
In order to create the best possible policies, gather a team to help oversee the policy writing process. Many organizations have a compliance officer or team, which is a good place to start, but a policy team should go beyond this.
Bring in different perspectives by including people from different departments, especially if there are a wide variety of policies to update. Also look for some experts to ensure your policies comply with all the relevant laws and regulations.
Not every member of the policy team needs to participate in the actual writing process, but they can provide helpful input.
This person will be responsible for making sure the policy is regularly reviewed, revised, and distributed. The process will look different for every organization, but here are a few best practices for writing policies and procedures in healthcare:. Healthcare policies should be customized for each organization. They should be tailored to the values and needs of your organization.
First and foremost, they should be based on existing laws and regulations. Larger hospitals or healthcare organizations may have legal experts available in-house or through industry networks. Smaller organizations or clinics can look to model policies as a good starting point.
Either way, keep in mind that requirements may differ depending on the size, nature, and location of your organization. Make sure to do your homework and create policies that work for your needs. Many healthcare organizations pursue accreditation as a way to improve the quality of care and build trust with their community. In order to achieve accreditation, your organization will need to meet a set of specific, strict, standards published by an accrediting body.
This includes requirements for policies, procedures, and training. Day-to-day tasks in healthcare tend to be much more complex and risky. If done wrong, even the most routine task can put a patient or staff member in danger. Healthcare procedures can be much more lengthy than those in other industries. So they need to be easy to follow.
When writing procedures, try to use clear, understandable language. Have front-line staff review the procedures to make sure they are practical, effective, and line up with best practices. Or see if you can shadow an employee to see how a procedure is done. This process can help alert management to workarounds and hidden processes that employees are utilizing to get the job done.
Perhaps the procedure is hard to understand or overly complex. The employees who do the task every day may be able to help you identify a more efficient procedure that still complies with laws and standards. The most effective policies communicate the reasons behind the rules. Employees need to know that policies and procedures are not just arbitrary. Following the policies and procedures will help improve patient care and organizational effectiveness.
Try to make these objectives clear and measurable. For example, a hospital hygiene policy might include the objective of reducing hospital-related infections.
Perhaps it includes the goal of reducing infections by 10 percent over the next year. Establishing this goal allows management to measure the effectiveness of the policy.
If infections have decreased, they know the policy is doing its job. If not, they can re-evaluate to figure out how to improve the policy and procedures or create a more realistic objective.
Healthcare involves a lot of technical language, industry jargon, and acronyms. While medical personnel may understand these terms, other employees may not. And your policies need to be comprehensible to everyone on your staff.
Writing policies and procedures in healthcare is a process. Even the best written policies will need revising. And many policies will require inputs and sign-offs from upper management. As you create policies, identify who needs to review them.
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