Quality Review – Aiming for Excellence and CORNERSTONE

Quality Review – Aiming for Excellence and CORNERSTONE®

Today the College is announcing a review of our quality standard Aiming for Excellence, and our quality improvement programme, CORNERSTONE®.

College President Dr Tim Malloy says this will be a significant piece of work, which will affect many of College members, as well as practices, PHOs and other sector organisations.

“Aiming for Excellence and CORNERSTONE® have been in place for about 20 years,” says Dr Malloy. “While they have evolved during that time, change in the sector, and in New Zealand as a whole, has happened faster, and things are now out of kilter.

“There are major changes happening in general practice and primary care, and we have a Government committed to having more services delivered in primary care, and to training more GPs.

“We need a fit-for-purpose, modern, quality improvement programme for general practice that creates the right environment for these changes to be successful.

“College members, practice teams and Primary Health Organisations have told us they want quality standards that support environments where more care can be delivered safely and equitably. Our own research, which we are releasing today, confirms this.”

Dr Malloy says the plan is to completely revamp Aiming for Excellence and the CORNERSTONE® programme. The following principles will be followed in the review process:

• a mandatory, minimum quality standard that all general practices must meet – currently the Foundation Standard should continue;

• the new programme should focus on quality indicators and measures that enable care to be delivered safely and equitably;

• there should be non-financial incentives for practices to undertake quality improvement activities that improve patient outcomes for enrolled populations;

• there should be a recognition system to acknowledge practices that consistently perform well against the standard;

• compliance costs should be reduced through initiatives such as developing a framework to cross-credit activities done for continuing professional development, and other assessment and certification purposes with CORNERSTONE® requirements and vice versa;

• as much assessment as possible done online to reduce time spent in practices; and

• there are tie-ins with other credentialing assessments, eg: day surgery requirements.

“The College is committed to working with members, practices and important stakeholders to develop the new CORNERSTONE® programme,” says Dr Malloy.

“We have set ourselves a target of having a new programme agreed by 1 December 2018, for practices to start implementing from 1 April 2019.”

Affected practices are encouraged to visit the College website or call 0800 433 733 for further information.

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