We’ve all had to adapt to remote working during the pandemic, thankfully digital solutions exist. Video-conferencing was certainly not new when Covid-19 first loomed over the horizon, but the need to stay connected when so much of the workforce was self-isolating or working from home meant that software such as Teams and Zoom came to the forefront and have now become as standard a part of our toolkit as old workhorses like Word or Excel. This has been a major advantage in bringing the wider healthcare community closer together to share information and innovation during one of the most challenging periods in the history of the NHS. Here at NTH Solutions, we have embraced this opportunity by connecting the experience and expertise of our Trust background with our work in the community, and in primary care specifically.
In April of this year, NHS England and Improvement updated the National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness, refocussing attention on efficacy, collaboration, and high-quality auditing. The biggest adjustment to the Standards was the requirement that all primary care settings be compliant within 18 months. Suddenly a wide range of settings that previously only used the Standards for advice and guidance are now tasked with a set of mandatory requirements.
As the subsidiary of a large acute Trust, NTH Solutions is immersed in the Standards, and found ourselves uniquely positioned to support primary care in understanding and implementing the mandatory requirements to achieve compliance before the April 2022 deadline.
To reach such a wide range of settings nationwide, we had to turn to digital solutions… we have launched a series of webinars to break down the Standards into a manageable, step-by-step pathway to compliance. Hosted by Graeme Kelly, Director of Decontamination, and Dan Sullivan, National Compliance Coordinator, the webinars demystify the subject in a succinct and accessible format, boiling down the 50+ pages of documentation into a 20-minute talk that identifies each key requirement and how to comply with it. Graeme, Dan and the rest of the team have adapted the array of templates to make them easier for primary care settings to pick up and use, alongside site surveys, auditing solutions, cleaning specification updates and ongoing support services.
Regardless of whether attendees choose to invest in the support service, the webinar provides a one-stop shop for complying with the National Standards of Healthcare Cleanliness; the presentation which supports the webinar is provided following the session, and there is a live Q and A at the end of every webinar to allow attendees to ask questions pertinent to their individual site. We have had overwhelmingly positive feedback so far, with hundreds of primary care settings benefitting from the information and services provided through our webinars.
The webinars are scheduled to run regularly up to and beyond the April 2022 deadline for compliance, and we’d encourage anyone thinking about the updated Standards to join a session and see what exactly they need to do and pick up a roadmap to compliance. Sign up for a webinar here.
