Accreditation and HPS Pharmacies
Written by: Mandy Francis, Accreditation Pharmacist, HPS Pharmacies - Alexander Avenue
HPS Pharmacies has recently completed the accreditation of our Head Office at 29 Alexander Ave Ashford SA.
We were last accredited three years ago. This year was an extremely successful time for us all as we passed the entire accreditation process with 100% pass rate in the initial audit.
This makes us the first pharmacy in South Australia to achieve this goal and we are all very pleased with our efforts!
Accreditation for pharmacy in Australia is a Commonwealth Government initiative which sees a set of eighteen standards applied to all pharmacies throughout the country.
These standards cover all aspects of customer service, cold chain adherence, security and emergency procedures, business methods, human resources and information technology issues including privacy and confidentiality.
Our plan is to accredit each of our pharmacy sites here in South Australia and also in Queensland, New South Wales, Victoria and Hobart. The project is due for completion in March 2008.
External assessment now occurs every two years at each site with a self-audit in between the official audits. And of course, we consider an ongoing commitment to quality is essential to our professional approach to the services we supply.
The Pharmacy Guild of Australia is the body which administers the accreditation program in Australia and, as it is with other quality assurance programs in the health sector, the content and focus varies and develops each year.
The present program stresses that in order to maintain it’s integrity the process as a whole must be evidence based. This focus will be even more the case when we undergo our next external audit in two years at each site.
In line with this I am ensuring that we will have all of this necessary evidence available at each of our sites and, excluding certain site specific details, the policies and procedures that we follow will have a consistent national approach. The aim of this approach is to work with our client organisations to produce a consistent quality service.