QED is a customer focused organisation that takes pride in delivering outstanding customer service.  The QED model is effective in delivery and efficient in design, offering a unique way of ensuring the real application of local knowledge to every aspect of service delivery.  We can achieve this because local and regionally competent partners add insight and creativity to clinical challenges within a standardised and quality controlled framework of delivery excellence.  Our partners are critical to the success of this model and so must be selected with the upmost care and attention with the relationships being continuously strengthened over years of collaboration.

QED achieve this with a comprehensive and dedicated Partnership Audit Program.  This outlines the QED audit strategy to ensure that all Partners and QED are culturally aligned and can work in compliance with procedural documents, GCP and regulatory requirements and to assist in the selection of future Partners and other Third Party Service Providers.

The purpose of this program is to define and ensure common quality standards across the entire organisation (including partners) to guarantee a consistent, high quality service to our customers at a competitive price.  The program also ensures ongoing conformity to high quality standards.

QED regularly conducts audits internally and at its partners with the key goals:

– To determine the strength of the internal control systems at QED & existing / potential partners

– To validate adequateness of resources and facilities

– To establish the level of compliance of procedural documents, GCP and laws

– To identify opportunities to improve the organisation of QED and partners

The partner model allows us to offer standardisation and efficiency to the highest level of quality and therefore a method by which we can exceed our sponsors’ expectations, both in terms of confidence in delivery and potential cost savings from more strategic collaboration.  Awareness of local challenges is preserved by having local partners who are experienced in their territory and culture.  With local management and training, which are location specific, overlying core QED values, systems and global project leadership we can drive quality throughout the model.

The QED partnering model offers the same platform of quality to that offered by traditional affiliate office models with customer access to subsidiaries in many countries.  What is different, however, is that the partner approach allows us to maintain local spirit and culture, whilst still ensuring seamless operations where all parties have shared goals.  When we deal with cultural differences we don’t want to overrule them, we want to understand them; we do not impose a Headquarters’ culture upon our local teams, instead we want to respect any culture different from our own and learn from it.  Once this underlying principle is established it becomes much easier to drive quality by getting the best out of experienced and technically able teams of partner experts working seamlessly as a single entity to meet our customers’ clinical objectives.