ISMETT is a Transplant Centre situated in Palermo, Sicily. It is the only multiorgan (liver, heart, lung, and kidney) transplant centre in Southern Italy. It also provides high specialty surgical and non-surgical procedures to the entire regional population (approximately 5 millions people living in the Sicilian Region). More than 1.200 patients have been transplanted at ISMETT in the last 10 years. Approximately, one third of them live in the Palermo area (about one millions of inhabitants), while two third of them live in the other areas of the Sicilian Region or outside Sicily. The distances between Palermo and other Sicilian cities vary from 100 to more than 250 Km. The state of road network and other communication route is not optimal and it represents a problem in maintaining a strict and continuous follow-up in the post-transplant period. Moreover, in the early post-transplant period, the need to maintain tight control of the clinical and laboratory results forces patients (still in not optimal conditions) to travel frequently. Health care system is funded by the Regional Government, which has been striving to reduce costs in the last decade.
Following the use of CAF and of the self assessment framework in 2010-2011, the organization was stimulated to apply the PDCA cycle for all the CAF criteria and subcriteria, and benefitted from the external evaluation by the CAF team in April 2011. The good practice that was implemented is based on the 2.4 subcriteria related to the planning, implementation and review of modernization and innovation, and on the 4.5, 5.2 and 5.3 subcriteria related to managing technology, to the development of citizen/customer-oriented services and products, and to the involvement of citizen/customers. The project is also based on subcriteria 1.4 and 4.1 related to managing the relations with politicians and other stakeholders in order to ensure shared responsibility and to developing and implementing key partnership relations, in fact the project has been supported by a grant from the Regional Government.
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