HKZ quality certificate icing on the cake for GGD Groningen

Jos Rietveld, director GGD Groningen: “As an institution, your primary task is to get your own affairs in order. I am therefore always healthily critical of external consultants. In 2017, however, there were a number of time-consuming issues on the table, including an expired HKZ quality certificate and an almost forgotten PDCA cycle. I then created a new policy plan, with the goal of getting back in line with what is common in our industry. But in order to execute that plan, we lacked capacity ourselves. So we approached Symbol, an organization we already knew had a lot of experience in our field. Symbol searched for us for a professional with experience at GGDs. Someone who understood the context of our organization and spoke our language, in order to quickly connect with managers and employees. This is how Maurits Dekker joined us, a regular associate of Symbol. And that turned out to be a good choice.” (Text continues below)

Not top down, but bottom up

“Our two goals for the project with Maurice were clear: 1) we wanted to obtain the quality certificate and 2) our quality management had to get back to the right level,” Rietveld continued. “Maurice worked on that very systematically for a year, two days a week. But the difficulty was in awareness. The importance of quality control, but also the importance of continuous improvement had yet to land in the organization. Maurits therefore organized several sessions and presentations, to start the conversation with as many people as possible. This took some time to get the hang of, but as the project progressed, the conversations got better and better. The context analyses he conducted with each team also helped. More and more people realized that quality should not be organized and enforced from above, but rather monitored bottom up.”

Engaged people who actively anticipate

“The GGD has a lot of little islands, from environmental care to forensic medicine and from consultancies to policy advice to municipalities,” adds Maurits Dekker. “With all 32 teams within the organization – even the front desk – I did a context analysis. ‘What risks and opportunities are there and what does our annual plan look like?’ The outcome? 32 beautiful annual plans, but above all: engaged people who actively anticipate what is happening inside and outside the GGD Groningen.”

Ownership, responsibility and commitment

According to Rietveld, it was a good move not to focus on management, but rather to work with all teams. “Because if it doesn’t land there, it will remain an imposed trick. Maurice also pulled very hard on this, and I’m happy about that. Of course it requires more time in preparation and implementation, but it has produced good results. It’s also about ownership, responsibility and commitment. And that is now in place within GGD Groningen. We have gone broadly to increase quality, and now work with a permanent improvement cycle. Maurits – with support from Symbol – has helped with that very well.”

Quality well secured

Meanwhile, GGD Groningen passed the audit for quality certification without significant comments. In short: the HKZ quality certificate is in. Rietveld: “Very nice, because after all, that was one of our two goals. But while that external accreditation is important, at its core it’s about those teams that have started to move. We have now reached the stage where we are working on a repetitive PDCA cycle ourselves. A quality committee has also been set up for this purpose (a recommendation from Maurits), which systematically reviews the issues within our GGD. In this way, the committee ensures that the issue of quality is properly safeguarded. By ourselves, not by an outside consultant. Maurits has helped us as an outboard motor to get a long way upstream. Now we are rowing on by ourselves.”