spectrum care's journey towards business excellence

One of Spectrum Care’s most important values is the pursuit of ‘excellence’ and we are driven, in all our activities, to be at the forefront of our field.

The better we can be as an organisation, the more able we’ll be to achieve our vision of ‘people with disabilities living great lives’.

As a result of this firm focus on business excellence, accreditation is an area in which Spectrum Care has excelled in recent years. Indeed, in attaining three years’ accreditation for two consecutive terms we have achieved something that all New Zealand health providers strive for.

More recently, however, we’ve come to the conclusion that accreditation fails to sufficiently challenge us as an organisation.

Motivated by the desire to test ourselves against other high-performing global organisations via an internationally recognised benchmarking or accreditation body, Spectrum Care undertook the decision last year to hand back our ‘Accreditation Certificate’ to the auditing agency.

We’re now applying a much more rigorous, internationally recognised standard – the New Zealand Business Excellence quality framework (ie the Criteria for Performance Excellence) – to all aspects of our organisation and activities.

The Criteria for Performance Excellence have been used by thousands of organisations worldwide to improve performance and capability; to help them respond to current challenges; and to address all the complexities of delivering results today while preparing effectively for the future.

We’ve launched into this new accreditation framework with enthusiasm and energy and, over the past year, have:

• Formally entered the New Zealand Business Excellence programme as an alternative quality framework
• Redesigned our management structure to incorporate business excellence as a key driver of our activities
• Set up teams to develop world-class systems for each area of our organisation
• Provided training for these teams
• Set up ‘terms of reference’ and documentation systems for this process
• Trained ‘evaluators’
• Obtained an independent evaluative snapshot of where Spectrum Care is currently on the global scale in all sectors.

It is our ambition to be ranked not only among the world’s best disability service providers, but comprehensively as one of the world’s best organisations, and we’ll provide updates here as we make progress on this exciting journey.

As we improve as an organisation, so too we improve our ability to deliver the highest-quality support to people who use our services.