Letterkenny University Hospital win national health and safety award

The Health and Safety team in Letterkenny University Hospital are delighted to have won a national Health and Safety Excellence Award for their work on internal audit.

The awards, which took place in March recognise and reward the most outstanding health and safety achievements in Ireland under twenty categories. LUH were winners in the healthcare category and the team celebrated their success with an event in the hospital last week.

Internal audits play a crucial role in healthcare quality improvement and huge work has been carried out by the health and safety team since their internal audit programme commenced in 2021. The overall purpose of the programme is to provide senior management in LUH with an overview of how the hospital’s occupational health and safety system is performing. It also assists the hospital in complying with the HSE Corporate Safety Statement and relevant legislation.

Speaking about the award Maria Mc Fadden, Quality, Risk and Safety Coordinator at LUH said, “The core aim of this programme of work is to ensure that our patients, staff and everyone using the hospital are kept safe. Using a framework of internal audit we have reviewed 39 departments in the hospital for compliance with health and safety requirements. With this data we make recommendations for improvement and work with individual departments on their own quality improvement action plans.

“Since commencing the programme all of the departments who have been re-audited, twenty in total, have showed strong evidence of improvement. This is exactly what we want to see as it means not only are we ensuring compliance with our legal requirements but also organisational learning has taken place. We are delighted to receive this award which recognises the work undertaken all across the hospital to improve our health and safety system.”  

Sean Murphy, Hospital Manager at LUH congratulated the team saying, “Ensuring continuous improvement of the hospital’s health and safety system is a priority for us. Robust systems and methodological auditing of those systems leads to improved outcomes for patients, which is our ultimate goal. I want to thank the health and safety team and all the departments who are engaging with this work from across the hospital.”