The safety of each and every one of our patients is our top priority. Our quality and governance framework provides assurance on compliance with standards and statutory obligations, continuous quality improvement provides a risk and escalation process. We work closely with regulators to ensure standards and deliver consistently outstanding care.
We carry out our processes every day, all year round, by reviewing the data collated by our quality and governance experts. Everything they teach us, we escalate throughout our business, right up to our leadership team.
We also share learnings with every Sciensus employee, from head office and helpline teams to the nurses and delivery drivers who visit our patients.
We are registered with the General Pharmacy Council (GPhC) for our pharmacy activity and our medication logistic network is compliant to the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) Good Distribution Practice (GDP) regulations. We’re proud to be the leading provider of out-of-hospital care in the UK and that means we’re regulated by a number of health and social care bodies. This includes the Care Quality Commission (England), the Regulatory Quality Improvement Authority (Northern Ireland) and the Care Inspectorate for Scotland.
Each of these regulators rightly expects us to deliver a well-led service that provides safe, effective care to the patients we serve. They review this by working closely with us throughout the year and carrying out regular, inspections. But we also take a proactive approach, constantly monitoring ourselves against the standards our regulators set, and using our corporate governance structure to help our teams exceed their expectations, time and time again.
Patient Safety
Our priority is to support our staff to deliver safe, reliable, and effective care with zero avoidable harm to our patients. Our Patient Safety Team work closely with colleagues right across our business, using national guidance to identify potential risks and investigate any situations where patient safety could have been compromised.
It’s a joined-up approach that helps us create a culture of transparency and openness, where everything we discover, we share – from the front line to the leadership team. We continue to encourage reporting of errors and incidents in order to learn and to promote positive reinforcement.
Pharmacovigilance (PV) is all about improving patient care and safety. As a clinical homecare provider it is a requirement for us to to have an effective system for capturing, monitoring and reporting of incidents and complaints. If you report experiencing side effects or dissatisfaction with a drug or product we are obliged to report this to the regulator and manufacturer, which we do in compliance with applicable law.
PV requirements exist to allow us, manufacturers and competent regulatory authorities (such as the European Medicines Agency and other authorities) to ensure the safety of patients and comply with regulatory obligations
Effectively managing risk sits at the heart of our quality assurance framework and it’s embedded right across our company, from the way we procure and handle medicines to the way we care for our patients. It also applies to entity-type risks relating to our company as a whole, and our external stakeholders. To help manage and mitigate risk, we carry out a whole range of compliance activities, based on the rigorous safety standard, ISO 9001. We also have our own internal audit regime, which touches every area of our organisation, and everything we do. Of course, sometimes events are beyond our control, but managing risk means being ready for anything.
We’ve built a strong business continuity plan and our contingency arrangements are regularly scrutinised by our regulators, the NHS and other external key stakeholders to make sure we’re able to keep serving our patients, whatever happens. We also have processes in place to make sure we can quickly discover the root cause of unexpected events, putting things right quickly and learning valuable lessons that minimise future risk for everyone.
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