University Hospital Kerry (UHK) has become the the first hospital in Ireland to successfully completed the National Theatre Quality Improvement Programme (TQIP), a new training programme which is a collaboration across the HSE’s Integrated Care Programme for Patient Flow, the National Clinical Programme in Surgery, the National Clinical Programme in Anaesthesia and RCSI.

Mr Kieran Tangney, Executive Director of the Quality & Process Improvement Centre at RCSI said: “RCSI’s Quality and Process Improvement Training Programme supports healthcare teams to enhance their process improvement capability and supports their ability to design more effective ways of working together. Taking a multidisciplinary team approach is key to sustainable improvement. It enables participating hospitals team to design safe, effective and efficient delivery of care for their patients. This approach directly benefits staff and their patients, as better designed work processes allows more time for direct patient care.”

Over the last year, as part of their ongoing onsite training, the TQIP team in UHK have worked on a series of patient flow and pathway redesign projects. This has led to a very significant improvement in theatre utilisation at the hospital. The multidisciplinary team consisting of nurses, surgeons, anaesthetists, porters, hospital management and administration staff were recently awarded their Quality and Process Improvement Certificates from RCSI at the National PAU conference in Tralee.

The National TQIP is now being rolled out to a number of other hospitals throughout the country.

RCSI is ranked among the top 250 (top 2%) of universities worldwide in the Times Higher Education World University Rankings (2018) and its research is ranked first in Ireland for citations. It is an international not-for-profit health sciences institution, with its headquarters in Dublin, focused on education and research to drive improvements in human health worldwide. RCSI is a signatory of the Athena SWAN Charter.