Susan Schutte

Surveyor

What is your experience in surveying?
As a systems driven, big picture thinker with a passion for palliative care, I appreciate that the COHSASA Standards for Palliative Healthcare Services is a fantastic tool used to deliver effective palliative care through a comprehensive set of criteria that help businesses or teams improve patient centred outcomes. It is a beautiful tool that guides organisations in becoming the best that they can be.

I enjoy visiting organisations, meeting the teams that run them and seeing the difficulties they have to overcome, while delivering quality care. Each organisation has a different culture or approach in the way that they incorporate the Standards as the basis of measuring themselves. Using a multitude of tools or approaches to develop systems to deliver the organisation’s mission opens my eyes as a surveyor and helps me realise that there is no absolute path, and that interpretation of the criteria being met by these approaches, is very important.

Being able to adapt and learn, or to help organisations understand the criteria and how to adapt them to improve their systems, is why I wanted to be a COHSASA Surveyor.