No Pain, No Gain ;O): Foundation

HALIFAX , May 3, 2012 /CNW/ - The IWK Health Centre Foundation has been selected as the benefiting charity for the 2012 TELUS World Skins Game taking place on Monday, July 30 and Tuesday, July 31 at the Glen Arbour Golf Course in Halifax , Nova Scotia. The funds raised from the event will go to the IWK Health Centre, which provides critical and specialized care to women, children and families throughout the Maritimes.

"On behalf of the IWK Health Centre Foundation, I'm honoured to thank TELUS for generously supporting the IWK," said Jennifer Gillivan, president and CEO of the IWK Health Centre Foundation. "TELUS is an amazing donor and we so appreciate its commitment in making the IWK a world-class centre of excellence for Maritime children, women, and families."

"As part of TELUS' ongoing commitment to 'give where we live', and the TELUS World Skins Game's long-standing tradition of benefiting local charities, we are pleased to support the IWK Health Centre Foundation and help maritime families receive the quality care they need," said Gen. (Ret.) Rick Hillier , Chair of the TELUS Atlantic Canada Community Board. "TELUS' gift will fund essential programs to ensure the IWK provides specialized health care right here at home in the Maritimes."

The TELUS World Skins Game is always a highlight of the Canadian summer sporting schedule for the country's most passionate golf fans, as well as the community that hosts it. Including corporate and team member donations, more than $10.4 million has been given to a wide variety of important causes across Canada as a result of the TELUS World Skins Game since 2001.

About TELUS

TELUS (TSX: T, T.A; NYSE: TU) is a leading national telecommunications company in Canada , with $10.4 billion of annual revenue and 12.7 million customer connections including 7.3 million wireless subscribers, 3.6 million wireline network access lines and 1.3 million Internet subscribers and more than 500,000 TELUS TV customers. Led since 2000 by President and CEO, Darren Entwistle , TELUS provides a wide range of communications products and services including wireless, data, Internet protocol (IP), voice, television, entertainment and video.

In support of our philosophy to give where we live, TELUS, our team members and retirees have contributed more than $260 million to charitable and not-for-profit organizations and volunteered 4.2 million hours of service to local communities since 2000. Eleven TELUS Community Boards across Canada lead TELUS' local philanthropic initiatives. TELUS was honoured to be named the most outstanding philanthropic corporation globally for 2010 by the Association of Fundraising Professionals, becoming the first Canadian company to receive this prestigious international recognition.

For more information about TELUS, please visit www.telus.com.

About IWK Health Centre Foundation

The IWK Health Centre Foundation helps sustain excellence in specialized care at the IWK for all Maritime families. Last year, generous donors contributed over $10 million to excellence in specialized care at the IWK, including neonatal and pediatric intensive care, women's health and mental health services for children and youth. Funds raised also support world-renowned researchers and the purchase of modernized technology and equipment. Together with donors, the IWK Foundation supported more than 16,000 inpatient visits and nearly 300,000 outpatient and emergency room visits in one year. Visit iwkfoundation.org for more information.

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Saturday, February 18, 2012

New Foundation Aims to Improve Health Care Delivery in Developing Countries

AMSTERDAM, THE NETHERLANDS and CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA and CHICAGO, IL--(Marketwire -02/17/12)- Three organizations from three different continents have taken the next step in their commitment and dedication to improve the safety and quality of health care provided in resource-restricted countries.

The South African-based Council for Health Service Accreditation of Southern Africa (COHSASA), the PharmAccess Foundation of the Netherlands, and U.S.-based Joint Commission International (JCI) have signed an agreement to establish the SafeCare Foundation (www.safe-care.org/).

SafeCare has grown out of a global initiative, launched in March 2011 in Cape Town, South Africa, to introduce a comprehensive quality improvement program using internationally recognized standards to improve health care delivery. The SafeCare Foundation is designed for health care providers in resource-poor settings to assist them in step-wise quality improvement and the delivery of safer care to their patients. As a new Foundation with its international board and its secretariat based in Amsterdam, SafeCare will be able to expand its knowledge and capacities even further and build on the concrete experience and skills of its founding organizations.

To date, the SafeCare program has been successfully initiated in more than 107 clinics in six countries -- Kenya, Nigeria, Tanzania, Ghana, Lesotho and South Africa.

The facilities participating in SafeCare have committed to improve the quality of their services as part of their participation in various insurance and medical credit programs. The first 10 of these facilities recently obtained "Certificates of Improvement," which were awarded based on reaching pre-defined levels of standard compliance. Placed in the African context, where many facilities face resource challenges and a high disease burden, this establishes the principle of graded improvement which many African facilities will follow in the years to come.

The analysis of SafeCare certification data will allow stakeholders (e.g. governments, investors, insurers and donors) in developing countries to support feasible, cost-effective and structured quality improvement rollouts in facilities. The Foundation will build and maintain a database of organizations using its standards and keep track of their progress as well as the progress of the facilities that are represented.

In summary, the SafeCare Foundation will offer large-scale quality improvement programs through automation of data entry, verification analysis and computerized web-based reporting. The impact of interventions by the SafeCare Foundation will be monitored through data analysis, and operational research and findings will be published in peer-reviewed journals.

In certain situations, the SafeCare Foundation will collaborate with other organizations to apply for the funding of quality improvement trajectories in resource-poor settings.

To achieve these objectives and to stimulate health care quality and patient safety, the SafeCare Foundation will arrange regular conferences to promote quality standards and health care quality issues. SafeCare Foundation will also publish information on the tools, goals and results of the program and will make information and standards publicly available through its website.

In addition to the above, under the umbrella of the SafeCare Foundation, a SafeCare Knowledge Institute will be established. As an operational research entity, the Knowledge Institute will provide health intelligence data on health care quality improvement in Africa, provide benchmarks, perform gaps analyses, and study the associations between quality improvement certification and medical output and outcome. These vital analyses can be used to inform donors and governments about the status of health care in specific regions or countries.

SafeCare
The SafeCare methodology combines the respective knowledge, expertise, skills, tools and experience of all three organizations -- COHSASA, JCI and PharmAccess -- to issue a graded "Certificate of Improvement" to different categories of health care facilities ranging from nurse-driven health clinics to district hospitals. Certificates range from level 1 to 5, which allows for demonstrating incremental achievement in compliance with the SafeCare Foundation Standards.

Health care facilities are rewarded with a "Certificate of Improvement" every time they reach the next pre-defined SafeCare step. If executed completely (SafeCare Level 5), this qualifies a facility for formal accreditation trajectories for example through COHSASA or JCI. The uniqueness is that the SafeCare route is all about relative improvement and does not demotivate African facilities with unreachable international absolute quality norms. Instead, SafeCare offers a step-wise approach, confronting facilities with incremental challenges with respect to quality and patient safety and eventually rewarding and motivating these facilities with recognition through its certification system. This step-wise improvement process can thus be used by governments, donors and companies to implement performance-based financing incentives. In addition, SafeCare can be offered in combination with various capacity building interventions, like access to affordable loans through the Medical Credit Fund (www.medicalcreditfund.org/) or inclusion in innovative insurance programs like those supported by the Health Insurance Fund (www.hifund.org).

About the founding organizations
Two of the SafeCare founding organizations, COHSASA and JCI, have been accredited by the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua), thus conferring upon them the authority required to assess health care clinics. ISQua is the only international program that "Accredits the Accreditors."

COHSASA - Based in Cape Town, South Africa, COHSASA (www.cohsasa.co.za/) is the only accreditation body for healthcare in Africa that is internationally accredited by the International Society for Quality in Health Care (ISQua) as a competent healthcare evaluation body and its standards are recognised as meeting the principles set out by ISQua. COHSASA has been working in the field of quality improvement and accreditation for over 17 years. During this time, COHSASA has worked in a range of over 580 different types of facilities -- from tertiary hospitals to basic clinics -- in the public and private sectors in South Africa, the SADC (Southern African Development Community) region and other parts of Africa. Countries in which programs are running are the RSA, Swaziland, Lesotho, Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Rwanda and Nigeria.

Joint Commission International - (www.jointcommissioninternational.org) Joint Commission International (JCI) was established in 1997, and is the international arm of The Joint Commission. Through international accreditation, consultation, publications and education programs, JCI extends The Joint Commission's mission worldwide by helping to improve the quality of patient care. JCI assists international health care organizations, public health agencies, health ministries and others in more than 90 countries.

PharmAccess Foundation - PharmAccess Foundation (www.pharmaccess.org/) is a Dutch not-for-profit organization dedicated to the strengthening of health systems in sub-Saharan Africa. Its ultimate goal is to improve access to quality basic health care including the treatment of HIV/AIDS. PharmAccess supports programs and offers services in the areas of medical and administrative capacity building, health insurance, HIV/AIDS and healthcare workplace programs, health investments and health intelligence. PharmAccess has experience in over 10 countries in Africa in upgrading and quality improvement of basic health care providers such as clinics and district hospitals. In addition PharmAccess improves the financial situation of health clinics by introducing insurance programs for secured income and by providing business training to get access to affordable financing mechanisms, including loans and investments.

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