The PRSAS team will be following the Cornwall Pulmonary Rehabilitation Team through a series of blog posts to discuss the PRSAS accreditation journey from beginning to end.
Historically, the Cornwall Pulmonary Rehabilitation Team had three PR services, and they had their official relaunch on 20 December. How was the relaunch?
As our services are really spread out geographically, it was really good for all of the teams to meet each other, and we also had a lot of senior management attend as well.
It was really important to me to make sure that this accreditation process is really visible to our senior management, to make sure that our teams are as supported as can be and we have buy-in from them in this process. We now have pulmonary rehabilitation accreditation as a standing topic during our clinical quality assurance groups which is great!
A common issue with community venues is evidencing strength testing – what will you be doing to work on that?
We have an exciting quality improvement project in the works, with the Southwest Respiratory Network – looking at using TheraBands. to do one rep. We have a fantastic sustainability GP, who will also look at the carbon footprint of weights vs TheraBand as well.
On that team there will be a physiotherapist and an OT working on that, its looking to be a 6-month project so we are looking forward to se what comes out of that.
How is your team currently working on accreditation?
One of the great outcomes from our relaunch day, the quality improvement team has come back to us with a list of standards they are able to help us complete. Looking at things like the organogram and pulling policies, it has been so fantastic to see how we are going to be supported throughout this process.
We also have had one of the PRSAS assessors, start as a team lead for the community rehab and inpatient team, so he will be coming to the Southwestern Respiratory Network meetings. Every other month we are planning to go through a different domain with the team, and he will come along to go through these and highlight things we should be focusing on.
What do you see being the biggest challenge for the services to during this accreditation journey?
I think often the first reaction to change is resistance, and there was definitely some anxiety about changing things within the service, especially when they are creating really great outcomes for their patients. As I mentioned before we are having regular meetings where pulmonary rehabilitation accreditation is discussed so that everyone is taking advantage of shared learning opportunity, so the teams are feeling a lot more positive about this now.
I think as well, it is a really huge piece of work, so we need to be careful not to burn out our valuable staff! The support we have had from senior management has been a huge help with this – and just taking it step by step whilst taking advantage of the collaboration we will be able to do during this process.
It really sounds like a strength of your services, and trust is fantastic communication and support between the teams – which will be fantastic through the accreditation process.
Yes absolutely, we have always had really great buy-in from the organisation, and they are all really interested in what are doing. The support we are getting from the quality improvement team with the relevant standard are great and the input from people who have experience with the PRSAS accreditation process will be vital to making sure our teams feeling supported during this.
We have lots of key people who want to come in and help, it doesn’t feel like people are needing to be pushed and pulled into coming along and contributing which is wonderful.
What are your next steps?
We have our regular meeting taking place, where we have made PR accreditation a standing topic, which was an important thing to put in place for us. Additionally, meeting regularly with the quality improvement ream so we are able to cross-reference all of the evidence they are pulling for us.
We are in the process of getting our mission statement and vision signed off by all the relevant people as well – this was another thing we were looking at during our relaunch day.
We are also looking at redesigning our web page for CFT and the ICB, which will be embedded into this process, and highly visible to everyone.
Aside from that, uploading evidence and attending the domain training sessions – just getting through it bit-by-bit!
If you break it down bit by bit into all the domains, its not any one individual’s responsibility to do ALL of it – we all need to work together as a team and it’s a shared workload.