Incident Management (IM) gets a bad rap because it is often brought up when mistakes and bad things happen. Unfortunately, sometimes that is true. However, sometimes while supporting someone to live an everyday life, incidents do happen and spoiler alert… it’s not always a bad thing! Incident Management seeks to ensure the health and safety of people using services. It also provides opportunities to refine our approach to best meet the person’s needs.
In our last Quality Management Plan, we worked to improve our incident management by:
- Ensuring compliance with ODP standards. Things like incident entry, closure, and investigatory timelines (if applicable).
- Making the process more collaborative with the person and their supporters.
We are glad to be able to say that over the past two years we have reached 100% achievement with our goals!
How did we improve our Incident Management?
- We revised our Incident Management (IM) processes to include people supported and their supporters. For example: if an investigation is required, the person supported is part of our administrative review process. Also, including the person supported in identifying and implementing corrective actions. Overall, we find that when the person is included, it leads to better outcomes.
- Frequent review of upcoming incident due dates. This helps us to stay on track with IM tasks.
- Additional IM training for our Leadership team members. We are continually seeking to increase our capacity!
- Our IM Representative attends monthly county IM meetings. This allows us to learn of and adopt updates in a timely manner.
- The Quarterly Trend Analysis is completed by our Executive Team. This prompts open discussion about past incidents and informs risk management moving forward.
- We revised our Incident Management and Preventing, Recognizing, and Reporting Abuse and Neglect training training to:
- Simplify the training content, making it easier to understand.
- Make the learning experience more interactive to promote collaborative learning.
Incident Management is about centering the person and what is important to and for them. It is many things, that when combined, enable people to live happily and safely, on their own terms.