Post a reflection on your personal and/or professional experiences with quality improvement. First, assess your familiarity with quality improvement in healthcare. Then, describe a time you experienced healthcare that was representative of either high or low quality. Be specific and provide examples. Explain which domains of healthcare quality were present and absent in that scenario.
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Quality Improvement
Quality improvement in health care is essential to ensure high-quality, safe, and responsive services for patients. According to Drew (2020), a quality improvement is a systematic approach that utilizes specific methods to improve quality. It requires disciplined and systematic ways to improve experiences and outcomes for patients, eradicate waste from processes, and eliminate errors.
I was once involved in a hand hygiene quality initiative to improve staff’s compliance to hand hygiene to control the transmission of pathogens that cause healthcare-associated infections(HAIs) and reduce the rates of HAIs in the health care facility. I collected data adherence hand hygiene compliance before and after the intervention and I was also allowed to express my opinions during the designing and implementation phases of the program.
The time I experienced healthcare that was representative of low quality is when patients had to wait for up to 60 minutes before they receive care. Long wait times were inconvenient for patients as they did not receive care on time which led to frustrations. The staff had to work overtime and deal with frustrated patients. As indicated by Robinson et al.(2020), .long patient wait time negatively impacts staff, physician, and patient satisfaction as clinics operate till late hours and providers have to manage dissatisfied patients and incur misses breaks and overtime.
Timely, patient-centered, efficient, and safe are domains of healthcare quality absent in the scenario. As explained by Salmond and Echevarria (2017), safe implies the system protects from being injured by the system that is supposed to help them through risk prevention and mitigation. Timely means reducing waits and detrimental delays while efficient implies avoiding waste, including waste of energy and time. Patient-centered means care that is responsive to patients’ specific needs and patients are involved in decisions about their care.
Equitable and effective are domains of healthcare quality present in the scenario. Equitable means providing care that does not vary in quality due to personal characteristics like ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status. Effective means decision-making and care are based on evidence, without overutilization or underutilization of beast available techniques (Salmond & Echevarria, 2017).
References
Drew, J. R. (2020). Why healthcare leadership should embrace quality improvement. BMJ, 368, m872. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m872
Robinson, J., Porter, M., Montalvo, Y., & Peden, C. J. (2020). Losing the wait: improving patient cycle time in primary care. BMJ Open Quality,9, 000910. doi:10.1136/bmjoq-2019-000910
Salmond, S. W., & Echevarria, M. (2017). Healthcare Transformation and Changing Roles for Nursing. Orthopedic Nursing, 36(1), 12-25. doi: 10.1097/NOR.0000000000000308