IDIAPJGol has held the ISO 9001 Quality certification since 2011. The Quality technician is Sandra Illán, Director of the Corporate Resources Area. The certification involved reviewing and auditing all the institute’s key processes:
As well as all support processes: Procurement, Human Resources, IT, Communication, Infrastructure…
“The certification process has brought many changes and improvements to my department,” explains Human Resources technician Laia Álvaro. “At first, describing everything we did was a huge task, but later it helped us simplify procedures. Having an external person bring new perspectives and question methodologies with constructive criticism helps to do things properly. Additionally, ISO encourages a working vision aimed at continuous improvement year after year.”
What is ‘Quality’?
On paper, managing Quality involves formalizing all the work processes of an organization: describing them, analyzing their risks and opportunities, setting indicators, and applying a system to introduce improvements year after year.
But Quality is much more than that: it is a way of approaching our work. It means ensuring that everything we do is done efficiently and effectively. It means seeking the satisfaction of our ‘clients’, the research staff, with the services we provide them. And, above all, it is about striving to improve every day in our mission: transferring the value of Primary Care research to society and generating improvements in people’s health and well-being.
Why is it so important?
Having a Quality Management System in place is essential in highly regulated sectors such as healthcare or pharmaceuticals. ISO 9001 helps us access high-impact research, clinical trials, international projects, or European funding. It is also a mandatory requirement to become a CERCA center, an accreditation level we are working towards, which will allow us to further expand and internationalize our Primary Care research and innovation.
Continuous improvement
Quality management is based on applying the PDCA methodology for continuous improvement: Plan – Do – Check – Act – Adjust. In this regard, for example, every year we conduct a satisfaction survey with all our clients and staff to understand how they use our services, what their opinions are, and how they think we could improve. The results help us propose a series of improvements.
