Case Study: Bereavement Services

Introduction

The Bereavement Services function for the Fife Council area is part of the Community Services service. It is a duty of Fife Council to provide adequate bereavement services including burial and cremations. Within Fife this service is covered by crematoria in Dunfermline and Kirkcaldy as well as 115 cemeteries throughout Fife (62 of which are active). Approximately 95 full-time members of staff are involved in the provision of this service.

Dunfermline Crematorium was originally registered to BS EN ISO 9002:1991 in 1993 and whilst the scope of registration was originally limited to that one site, the scope was expanded to include Fife Council’s Skip Hire Unit (introduced as part of sector CSO). Registration excluded design and development.

The scope of registration was expanded to include Kirkcaldy Crematorium and all burials. At this time the Skip Hire Unit was dropped from the registration scope.

In addition to their ISO 9001:2000 registration, Parks and Amenities and Bereavement Services are currently recognised as an Investor in People; although this is being dropped until internal systems are realigned to meet all the indicators of the new IIP Standard. The EFQM model is also being used.

Benchmarking within the Institute of Cemetery and Cremation Management (ICCM) is also used as part of the Best Value Charter Assessment Scheme and we also benchmark with the Association for Public Service Excellence (APSE).

Why ISO 9000?

A Bereavement Services employee has been quoted as saying, “We have got to ensure that we put people in the right lair and maintain the correct records”. The services provided by Bereavement Services are needed at a very sensitive time in a family’s life and therefore have to work at the highest standard. This is reflected in the objective of the Quality Policy Statement; “To provide personal and respectful burial and cremation services”. It all sounds very simple; however in the past there have been problems relating to a lack of recording of activities and reliance upon individual members of staff holding too much information in their heads. Working practices varied between individuals across Fife. Consequently when a member of staff left the service, the knowledge they possessed left with them, e.g. lay out of graves and information on what coffins lay in different lairs. As long as these practices continued, the consistency of delivery of service across Fife was always going to be less than optimal. ISO 9001:2000 provides a framework and guidance on how to maintain consistent delivery of your service as well as customer satisfaction and continual improvement.

There was initial resistance to expand the system across the whole of the service as people don’t like change and personnel came on board and we now have managers and staff participating in regular Quality Improvement Team meetings.

Implementation

As previously mentioned; the first area of Bereavement Services to achieve registration to ISO 9002:1994 was Dunfermline Crematorium. This was limited to cremations and related documents and it was felt that this system should be transferred to Kirkcaldy crematorium and all other parts of Bereavement Services. In addition to maintaining registration, the ‘discipline’ of conducting regular internal audits was viewed as a very valuable tool and ensured that we adhered to the required quality practices defined in our procedures. There was a large internal audit pool of people from which we could pull teams to ensure we continued to maintain our good practices and that our processes and procedures were still relevant.

We now perform process audits as well as including some compliance audits and through the structure of ISO 9001:2000 ensure that we monitor and maintain our registration. Due to restructuring many of the original auditors have let their auditing skills lapse. However the Service is currently in the process of training up a new pool of internal auditors.

An interesting added advantage of using ISO 9001:2000 is in relation to scenario planning that the Service has to conduct to be ready to cope with the potential effect of a flu pandemic. Through well-defined processes and procedures it is possible to anticipate staff numbers required and how best to approach the induction of new staff should this need arise.

When we needed to address the transition from ISO 9002:1994 to ISO 9001:2000, we used this work to stimulate new ideas and approaches rather than view this as another hurdle we had to jump. We placed greater emphasis on the role of our management team and by using the stronger customer focus and continual improvement requirements, have moved our practices onto a more visible level. Considerable effort has been made defining all our processes and these have been communicated to all staff members. A greater emphasis has been placed on the implementation of Process Management across Fife Council and a new tool, Advantage ‘QMAP’ has been defined as the means by which we will capture all our processes. This has resulted in Bereavement Services reviewing all our internal processes and amending these to take us to a preventive rather than corrective approach in managing the Service. We have also seen a more relaxed approach being taken to internal auditing and employees have commented on this as now being seen as a benefit rather than something that had to be endured.

It is important to get the correct balance of audits right as too many is deemed a nuisance by Auditees and management alike.

Future plans within Bereavement Services are:

 Development of a less prescriptive approach in our Audit Checklists

 Process rather than compliance audits

In conclusion, the key motivator in the introduction of ISO 9002:1991 so many years ago has continued and has resulted in better management and delivery of Bereavement Services to the citizens of Fife. This still remains our key driver today and through analysis of our customer/client surveys and resolution of any complaints, we can report the following results:

 Burials = 97.7% customer satisfaction

 Cremations = 99.8% customer satisfaction

We shall continue to use the ISO9001:2000 Standard in our day to day work. We have come a long way since we first achieved registration; however there are always easier, better, faster, more economical ways of working and we will continue to strive:

‘To provide personal and respectful burial and cremation services’

For further information on the use of ISO 9001:2000 within the Bereavement Services, contact John Swan on 01592 411516; or for more information on Fife Council’s approach to ISO 9001:2000 registration, Anne Barber on 01592 417462.