Northwest Return to Work Renews CARF® Accreditation
Northwest Return to Work (NWRTW) earned a three-year CARF® accreditation in 2020, which was recently renewed.
What is CARF®?
For more than 50 years the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (CARF®), an independent accreditor of health and human services, has been assisting medical programs around the world to assist and distinguish a provider’s service delivery. Receiving accreditation is a rigorous process that if achieved, signals to the public that the provider is committed to continuous performance improvement, is responsive to feedback, and is accountable to the community and its other stakeholders. These accreditations last for a maximum of three years before they must be proven again.
Why is CARF® important for medical providers?
As with any organization, it’s vital to ensure that how we deliver our services is not just excellent in our clinical practice but is also achieving positive results in areas like organization, leadership, planning, safety, technological competence, financial adherence, and performance improvement.
These topics alone are worth significant discussion in any setting but are especially impactful to those we serve in healthcare. These discussions are, and must always be, in a state of evolution if we want to succeed in creating a space in which stakeholders are served to the best of our abilities. CARF® serves as a comprehensive evaluation of all these topics and more; driving each business that undergoes this process to prove themselves as achieving their standards and as worthy of their label, if only for a time.
What does it mean to be accredited?
Accreditation requires an in-person survey, the submission of evidence for standards, and extensive interviews with past and present clients, staff, stakeholders, and leadership. This is done to ensure that the organization is adhering to a list of standards outlined in a yearly released several-page manual. A business must identify specifically how it addresses policies, who they affect, and what can change for the better. These surveys are carried out by industry professionals, many of whom have spent decades as practitioners themselves.
The CARF® organization is not immune to its own standards either. Their standards have been consistently shifting to adapt to encompass modern issues that are becoming ever more present topics of discussion in clinical practices. Subjects like accessibility, equity, inclusion, and diversity are among the hundreds of items to consider. A practice that excels in one sector may not receive accreditation on the grounds that the others need more attention.
An organization that receives its accreditation must be surveyed again to have its accreditation renewed, there must be evidence that they have continued their improvements, heeded past suggestions, progressed through challenges, and reflected on each success and failure.
An organization that is accredited multiple times can see this as a process that isn’t just three years in the making, but always ongoing. A sign of superior excellence for an organization. Achievement through CARF® doesn’t just come from the effort required to meet their standards but in the submission of plans and their progress to address areas seeking improvement. Over the years, our privilege of working with CARF® has given us opportunities not only to highlight our potential vulnerabilities but also to highlight our successes.
Consumers face a variety of options when deciding what services to use and who should provide them. CARF® surveys hundreds of thousands of programs around the world and was founded as an independent, nonprofit accreditor in 1966. To learn more about CARF® and what it means to be a CARF® provider, go to https://www.carf.org/Accreditation/
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