We chatted to Coventry & Rugby GP Alliance to discover the reasons for their move to PolicyStat and how the system is supporting their future goals.
1. What are the drivers for Coventry & Rugby GP Alliance to move to PolicyStat?
Our whole policy management process was very manual and lengthy. All our policies were stored on a shared drive and an intranet page. Although the intranet page was available to all staff across the Alliance, a generic login was needed to gain access, which staff had difficulty remembering and then had a long list of policies to search through to find the one they were looking for.
The review process of our policies was also very manual. The Governance team had to monitor policy review dates manually on a spreadsheet, stored on a shared drive. This made it hard to ensure all policies were reviewed and updated on time and when policies were updated, this had to be reflected in several locations, making version control an issue.
2. What are the key features in PolicyStat Coventry & Rugby GP Alliance?
- The weekly and monthly automated reports sent to our policy owners and administrators is a key feature for us. They now have a clear overview of the policies that are coming up for review, those that are currently under review and policies that are overdue, helping the team to prioritise and improve efficiencies.
- The advanced search functionality for end users means they can quickly find the policy relevant to them. Staff can now also access policies on any device, whenever and wherever they need.
- The built-in templates mean all new policies and procedures are drafted and saved on a set template, ensuring all our policies and procedures are consistent and look the same across the organisation.
3. What organisation-specific or (NHS) strategic goals is the customer hoping PolicyStat will support? And how do they anticipate PolicyStat will help achieve these goals?
Two of the key goals that PolicyStat is going to support us with are:
- Setting up best practice as business as usual in quality assurance. We are setting the whole alliance up for success by ensuring staff have easy and quick access to all policies and procedures, so they always know the right thing to do, supporting learning and ownership of activities across any device.
- Preparations for CQC inspections. With PolicyStat we know that we have everything is documented and in one place. That makes preparing for CQC inspections simple and we can be confident in demonstrating that we have procedures in place.
4. Final thoughts from Sarah Weir-Smith - Chief Nurse, Coventry & Rugby GP Alliance
“PolicyStat is going to transform our policy management processes. Having a digital tool at our fingertips that provides a single source of truth means we can be confident staff always know the right thing to do and don’t waste time searching through multiple documents, allowing them to concentrate on their day jobs. With the review features in the system allowing us to track changes and know who has reviewed, we know the exact status of all our policies and can be sure from a compliance perspective we are hitting all the marks.”
