Lisbon Faculty of Medicine Library on the route to Quality: using the “Common Assessment Framework (CAF) as a challenge for improving our services.

Introduction

Since October 2010, an intensive investment in education about Quality and CAF model was carried out, by quality experts, for the administrative staff of the Lisbon Faculty of Medicine. This was a favourable environment, with a deeply involvement of four Library staff members, that made possible a specific quality project for our library and its start up in September 2011.

CAF: Common Assessment Framework is a Self-Assessment Tool, inspired by the EFQM model, built by European Institute of Public Administration (EIPA) for helping Public Administrations of Europe to improve themselves through self-assessment.It is a free of charge model.

Objectives

The goal of this poster is to share the experience of the CAF model application in self-assessment of the Lisbon Faculty of Medicine Library.

Methods

This model resumes Deming’s concepts of Continuous Quality Improvement through the continuous “Plan-Do-Check-Act” PDCA cycle, which process is exactly that of continuous quality improvement .

The self-evaluation is a comprehensive, systematic and standard revision of the activities and the results of an organisation. This process allows the organisation to discern which are its strong points and which areas could be bettered, and culminates in planned amelioration actions that are constantly monitored during the process of change.

Both in the CAF model and in the EFQM model, there are nine criteria: five of these are called enablers: Leadership, Strategy and planning, Human resources management, Partnerships and resources, Process and change management; the other four the results: People results, Customers/citizen-oriented results, Society results and Performances.
The Results Criteria indicates what the Library has been able to attain throug the Enablers Criteria

Conclusion

The self-assessment process by using the CAF model in our Library, allowed us to identify which are the strong points of our library and, instead, which areas could be bettered.

After the self-diagnostic phase, the first step is planning amelioration actions that will be constantly monitored and so on... This means being involved in a process of change.