Impact of COVID-19 on activities

Like many of you the Corona virus (COVID-19) pandemic meant that our teams of international peer review surveyors were not able to travel or go out on-site to undertake organisational surveys or assessments. 

 

As the assessments of standards and surveyor training programmes are undertaken as desk-top exercises these were able to proceed as normal. 

 

However, due to COVID-19 restrictions many of you were not able to complete your planned revisions of standards or undertake surveyor training and so we did experience some movement in our survey schedule with many surveys being re-scheduled until later in 2020 or postponed to 2021.  

 

The biggest impact was on our organisational surveys with the majority being postponed until 2021. 

 

With international travel restrictions looking likely to be in place for some time we then started to look at our assessment methodology to ascertain if we could undertake our organisational surveys using a virtual or hybrid survey methodology. 

 

We did a survey with our surveyors to ascertain how many would be interested in participating on a virtual or hybrid organisational survey.  

 

A review of our organisational surveys was then undertaken to identify which would be suitable for assessment via a virtual survey methodology. 

 

Factors such as the number of accreditation cycles undertaken to date, the result from the previous organisational survey including the number of risks and recommendations were reviewed as part of this process. 

 

We also reviewed our assessment methodology to ascertain what additional evidence might be required from organisations in advance of the survey and how specific aspects normally assessed on-site may be reviewed virtually. 

 

We then approached the Malaysian Society for Quality in Health Care (MSQH) as they met the criteria and had postponed their Quarter 1 2020 organisational survey to see if they would be interested in participating in a virtual organisational survey in late September / early October 2020. 

 

It is never easy to be the first to try anything and so we are especially grateful to MSQH for agreeing to be the pilot organisation and to travel this new path with us. 

 

We would also like to acknowledge and thank the survey team of Ed Chappy, Gary Smith and Tricia DorĂ© for agreeing to participate and to pioneer this new assessment methodology. 

 

Since then we have completed our second virtual organisational survey with CHKS (Assurance and Accreditation) and we would also like to thank all the team at CHKS and the survey team of Danielle Dorschner, Triona Fortune and Fabienne Menot. 


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