The Netcare Group was recently awarded the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) 9001-2015 certification by the British Standards Institution (BSI) for quality management. The Group includes Netcare hospitals, Netcare 911, Medicross, National Renal Care, Netcare Oncology and Netcare Education.
Commenting on this certification, Netcare Group CEO Dr Richard Friedland noted that the achievement is part of an ongoing quest to provide consistent quality patient care.
He said: “As part of our aim to differentiate ourselves based on consistently providing the best and safest health services and person-centred care, we are continually focused on implementing quality management initiatives across all of our divisions.
“This effectively meant that we had to remove any degree of variability in service excellence across group operations. The standardisation of processes as part of our quality management system is key to our achieving our objective of delivering ‘Consistency of Care’.
“A core component of these activities involved the evaluation and upgrading of our practices, processes and policies in order to align ourselves with the internationally recognised BSI benchmark of evaluation against the global ISO 9001-2015 standards.”
According to Friedland, 39 Netcare facilities and all divisional head offices were recently audited by BSI against the ISO 9001-2015 standard, and the quality management system of the Group was found to comply with all the standard’s requirements.
BSI will conduct annual surveillance audits in sample facilities across all Netcare divisions in order to ensure that operations remain fully compliant.
“While the ISO certification is an important milestone in the quality journey of the Netcare Group, it is by no means the final destination. In order to provide quality care consistently, we need to remain focused at all times and take personal responsibility for providing quality care to every single person with whom we interact,” concluded Friedland.
