Ireland’s health minister tours Calvary

Calvary hosted Ireland’s Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly this month, to showcase how the innovative Irish auditing tool MEG is enhancing practice at Calvary Ryde Residential Aged Care service.

Calvary’s National Director Clinical Governance, Kris Salisbury, said the decision to use MEG was about making an essential task meaningful.

“As a healthcare provider committed to quality care, we adopt robust auditing processes to ensure we remain compliant in a highly regulated system and do our best to ensure patient safety,” Ms Salisbury said.

“Ultimately, we wanted our auditing practices to lead to improving care and enabling transparency about the care we provide to our patients, residents and clients.”

Calvary collaborated with MEG to develop a flexible auditing tool that has been adapted to suit the various health streams across the organisation and the service changes that have been implemented over time. The roll-out of MEG commenced in 2022, with the onboarding of Calvary’s then 14 hospitals, and the response within those services has been overwhelmingly positive.

“The real-time dashboard has made a significant difference across the hospitals, as it allows individual users across the sites to focus on their own data, more easily identifying opportunities for consistent improvement.

“Our aged care homes transitioned to MEG six months later following a major acquisition. This has allowed us to generate a culture of transparency and standardised improvements, and create operational efficiencies,” Ms Salisbury added.

Calvary’s home care services were brought on to the digital auditing dashboard in 2023, enabling an organisational-wide view of compliance, quality and safety with standardised audit controls underpinned by an efficient, digitised process.

“The next steps for us in using MEG is to create data-backed benchmarking across the organisation to track our improvements and that is an exciting space to be in,” Ms Salisbury said.

SOURCE: Calvary Health Care

Calvary-Ireland group: (L-R) Mark Cox from MEG; Calvary’s Head of Data, Insights and Analytics, Tamara Gusa; Ireland’s Minister for Health, Stephen Donnelly; Calvary’s National Director Clinical Governance, Kris Salisbury; Calvary Ryde Home Manager, Samita Gurung, and Enterprise Ireland’s Judith Harrington.

With Calvary Ryde residents: Calvary Ryde aged care home residents Ana, Alice and Michael sat down for lunch with, from left, Calvary’s Kris Salisbury, Ireland’s Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly, and Ireland’s Ambassador to Australia, Tim Mawe