June Lancaster, a nurse by background, who has spent 35 years working within healthcare and facilities management companies, and now runs her own consultancy, Asset Wisdom, and Steve Goodchild, an engineer with over 40 years’ healthcare engineering experience, and a director at estates and facilities solutions consultancy, CPA, argue that better teamwork and communication between clinicians and estates and facilities professionals, and a greater understanding of each other’s roles, would contribute significantly to an even safer, more efficient, patient care environment.
For healthcare professionals, the ‘buzzword’ is ‘safe’. It shouldn’t need stating, but a key clinical objective is to ensure safe patient care within a safe environment; therefore effective collaboration between clinical staff and healthcare estates staff is essential. Competing priorities and finite resources create many challenges as we strive to achieve this. We often forget that working together as a team can improve efficiency and effectiveness, and, importantly, reduce risk, to ensure that we create and maintain a safe environment for patients, staff, and visitors.
The Department of Health is introducing changes to the CQC registration regulations, responding to recent failings, and has consulted on eleven new ‘Fundamental Standards’ for care, to update or replace the current Standards for Care. Once agreed, these standards will form part of the CQC assessment process. The following are among the Standards:
Divided by a common language
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