It's fab news for our Children's services. After so much hard work - and a little boost from their young patients -  the team have secured the first  service accreditation in the country and been hailed as "exemplary"

It's taken so much effort.

Here, our  lead nurse for Children’s Services Julie Mellor gives CHFT Weekly an idea of just some of the work that took place and how the children on the ward also helped in the process.

She said:  “The whole team have been working hard for more than a year to gather and submit evidence to Comparative Health Knowledge System (CKHS) – a hospital benchmarking service.

“We also told some of the children on the ward we were having some inspectors in and asked them to draw some name badges of what the children would like to say about us – they made some really sweet badges (see below).

“We added Hello My Name Is, and presented them to the inspectors at the launch for them to wear during the inspection, which they absolutely loved.

"The accreditation process began in early 2017. The process helps us to reassess the service against a bespoke set of nationally recognised standards.

"We submitted a huge amount of evidence to CKHS to assess our work. The criteria within each of the standards are referenced to the current requirements of the Care Quality Commission and the Health Information and Quality Authority.

Quality of care and service for patients is assured when there is a strong commitment to continuous improvement in patient safety.

The service is benchmarked against other units to compare across a range of indicators.

We were externally assessed on site over three days in April. Gill Harries and Julie were joint project managers.

Julie added:  “We had great support from Laura Malik and Terry Matthews in the quality team, leads and frontline staff within both Children’s Services and the Trust.

"We are awaiting the final formal report, though early feedback has said that we are “Exemplary, a true team with strong leadership and that we were safe, interesting, energetic, open and honest and get the job done”.  

"The team are feeling really proud and would like to thank the support that they have had from across the organisation - this couldn’t have been done without all their support."