Quality of Care at Animal Trust
Animal Trust’s mission is to provide access to affordable, compassionate, and quality care. As part of our commitment to quality, our dedicated Quality Team ensures that we strive to lead in maintaining clinical standards, while ensuring that we provide pragmatic and accessible care to patients, and to engender a culture of ongoing continual improvement in our clinical teams.
Why Is Quality Important to Animal Trust?
We believe that accessible patient care should not mean accepting poor standards of care. We aim to provide a good quality of care to all our patients, and this should be driven by evidence-based medicine, along with a pragmatic and sensible approach.
What is the Role of the Animal Trust Quality Team?
Clinical Governance – this is the process by which clinical organisations maintain standards, provide ongoing improvement, learn from problems and develop solutions to continually drive improvement. This is done via several processes- clinical auditing, significant event review and generation of key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure our success, or highlight where improvements need to be made. This aspect of Quality is overseen by the Animal Trust Clinical Compliance Manager and the Clinical Board, which is made up of Veterinary Surgeons and Registered Veterinary Nurses from throughout the company.
Maintaining Quality Standards – our internal site auditing process, led by the Animal Trust Quality and Compliance Officer, is designed to ensure that all Animal Trust sites undergo a regular process of review of compliance with regulatory and professional clinical standards. Our unique, self-developed site auditing system is designed to drive standards and also to ensure that we are compliant, on an ongoing basis, with the RCVS (Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons) Practice Standards Scheme, to which all our practices are accredited.
Maintaining Regulatory Standards – regular internal auditing is led by the Animal Trust Regulatory Compliance Manager, to ensure that all sites are compliant with the relevant UK regulatory standards and legal requirements - in particular those set by the HSE (Health and Safety Executive), the VMD (Veterinary Medicines Directorate) and the ICO (Information Commissioner’s Office).
Innovation – we aim to develop innovative processes to streamline client and employee experiences and to drive efficient working practices. This includes adoption of technological solutions, as well as developing standard operating procedures and training materials.
RCVS Practice Standards Scheme
All Animal Trust sites are accredited by the RCVS Practice Standards Scheme to a minimum level of General Practice Accreditation, up to Hospital and Emergency Services Clinic for our 24/7 Pet A&E centres. This means that they undergo a demanding external audit by Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons (RCVS) inspectors at a 4 yearly interval. As part of our drive for quality of care, we not only undergo this regular external inspection, but we also put our sites through a regular internal quality audit to ensure that standards are maintained in the interim period.
New Graduate Training Programme
All newly graduated Veterinary Surgeons in the UK are required to take part in the VetGPD Scheme (Veterinary Graduate Development Programme), which is overseen by the RCVS. This provides in work support for new graduates for the first stage of their career. All Animal Trust sites that employ new graduate Veterinary Surgeons are VetGDP Approved Graduate Development Practices. In addition to this basic requirement, we have developed our own New Graduate Programme, to ensure that we develop clinical skills and confidence in all of our new Graduates, to help foster quality in clinical care.