Sodexo scores accreditation for facilities management at Queen's Hospital

The on-site services provider has achieved ISO 9001 (2008) accreditation for its food services and has for the first time achieved accreditation for both FM and healthcare support services on one certificate. Sodexo provides the hospital with hard and soft services including patient, staff and visitor dining and domestic services along with building maintenance and energy management. Queen's Hospital is a 939-bed acute hospital providing clinical services including significant neurology, oncology and women's and children's specialities. The ISO 9001 (2008) accreditation is designed to help organisations be more structured and organised. To achieve this, Sodexo had to demonstrate that its quality management system adhered to the requirements of the ISO standards. The benefits of the accreditation include improved internal working, better customer satisfaction and loyalty and improved morale and motivation. Sodexo's system at Queen's Hospital focuses on client involvement and continuous improvement. It includes an online client query process allowing clients to ask questions along with a time governed automated response. Clients can also access the full site system via their own unique password. As part of the accreditation process, six Sodexo employees at the hospital were trained to be internal auditors assessing systems and processes at various stages. Alan Brownlie, Sodexo facilities manager, was appointed as quality representative. Employees were briefed and encouraged to participate by coming up with ideas to improve services and by talking about why ISO standards are important to them. An education programme was also set up which included management presentations to the Sodexo team and client. It took the Sodexo team three and a half months to achieve the accreditation and now they will begin a robust audit and internal review process to retain the accreditation. Sodexo is looking to roll this out across its Healthcare division and in addition has recently achieved the ISO 14001 accreditation for its environmental management system at Stoke Mandeville Hospital in Aylesbury. David Whittall, head of safety, Sodexo Healthcare said: "This is a superb result and everyone involved in the process and development is to be congratulated. We know that other teams can learn from the best practice generated by employees at Queen's Hospital and we look forward to further successes in our next phase of the project. We are aiming to achieve full corporate accreditation for every Healthcare contract and service by 2011."