Welcome to the 50th edition of our newsletter.
Across the years and 50 issues, we have remained committed to not only working to improve the quality and safety of health and social care services, but also to keeping the people who use, provide and fund services informed about our work. This commitment is set out in our recently published Corporate Plan for 2022-2024.
The corporate plan outlines our key objectives for the next three years and sets out the steps we will take to fulfil our vision of safer services and better care for all. As CEO, I look forward to working with my team and our external stakeholders to achieve HIQA’s mission and our objectives. In this issue, you will see that a number of these objectives from the plan are already progressing.
Our inspection activity in health and social care services continues, with the findings from both our regulation of services for people with disabilities and monitoring of children’s services in 2021 set out in this issue. These overview reports give us an opportunity to reflect on and draw learning from our inspections in services. While governance and management was a prevalent issue in the disability sector last year, we found that resourcing was impacting the quality of care children were receiving. We hope these findings will be used by providers to drive improvements in care.
The development of Overarching National Standards for the Care and Support of Children using Health and Social Care Services with the Mental Health Commission also aims to improve the quality and consistency of services that children receive when they access care. Last month, we submitted these standards to the Department of Health and the Department of Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth for Ministerial approval. We look forward to engaging with the Departments to progress the implementation of the standards for the benefit of children and their families.
We also continue to conduct health technology assessments (HTAs) to inform important health policy decisions. In recent weeks, we published an assessment on improving the clinical care pathway for patients with type 2 diabetes, and we continue to work on HTAs to inform decisions in other areas, such as the expansion of the childhood immunisation schedule to include varicella (chickenpox) vaccination and the potential addition of severe combined immunodeficiency to the National Newborn Bloodspot Screening Programme in Ireland.
In line with our Corporate Plan, we are working in collaboration with the Health Service Executive (HSE) and Department of Health to develop and implement the National Care Experience Programme. The Programme aims to capture people’s experiences of care and use this information to achieve measurable improvements for people accessing the health and social care system. The 2022 National Inpatient Experience Survey closes at the end of this week, with over 25,000 patients invited to take part and tell us about their experiences in hospital. Furthermore, we look forward to publishing the results of Ireland’s first National Nursing Home Experience Survey in the coming months.
As I close out my message for this 50th edition of our newsletter, I want to take the opportunity to thank you all for subscribing and for your interest in our work. HIQA remains committed to protecting the people using services, and working with stakeholders to enhance and enable equity, quality and safety of health and social care services for everyone in Ireland.
Until next time,
Best wishes,
Angela Fitzgerald