What is quality improvement in healthcare?
Quality improvement uses systematic methods, tools, and continuous actions to lead to measurable improvements in healthcare. These are constantly monitored, assessed, and reviewed to ensure quality improvement initiatives are achieved to improve standards further.
The idea of making quality improvements isn’t new. It’s clear there is an urgent need to adapt quality of care across NHS services to improve standards and ensure aims in the new NHS comprehensive care plan are achieved.
Both NHS leadership and management will be significant in implementing changes to improve quality of care. They will be responsible for facilitating changes and ensuring all members of staff are aware of the goals to improve patient outcomes.
The importance of healthcare quality
Quality improvement is important because it is directly related to the service patients receive. All NHS organisations in England are required to improve the quality of care they deliver. Quality improvements are important to healthcare because they can measure a variety of aims from financial services to the most prominent, patient safety.
With the continuous advances of technology, the healthcare industry gets redesigned constantly to use recent technology and new techniques. But even with the assistance of technology there is always more room to improve standards. Quality improvement improves efficiency in three key areas:
- The efficiency of the practice
- The enhancement of patient care
- Patient satisfaction
The Institute of Medicine states 6 domains of healthcare quality to consider whilst improving quality:
- Safety – You must avoid harm to patients.
- Effective – providing evidence-based care refrains patients receiving care that is unlikely to benefit them.
- Person-centred – all care must be responsive to the individual patient preferences, needs and values.
- Timely – waiting times for care needs to be reduced and harmful delays need to be avoided.
- Efficient – Services must avoid waste.
- Equitable – care must be at the same quality regardless of personal character, gender, ethnicity, sexuality, location, or socioeconomic status.
What are the benefits of quality improvement programs?
Quality improvement in healthcare provide a variety of benefits in helping to improve standards.
- Improves patient-centred care – Quality improvement programmes can be used to design services that tailor and respect patients’ requirements to manage a customised patient care plan.
- Helps patients to stay protected – Using systematic approaches of services can obtain optimal care for patients and keep them protected from any injuries or postoperative infections through the care planned to help them.
- Helps staff to stay prudent – by constantly updating processes and ensuring they are carefully improved you can avoid issues even before they arise.
- More economical – improving overall standards eliminates wastage of medical equipment and office supplies. It reduces costs due to mistakes and medical errors by making the healthcare system more reliable and easier to maintain.
- Can improve morale – consistently achieving and exceeding baselines with quality improvements motivates staff to maintain the good work and could increase partnership and funding opportunities.
Quality improvement in healthcare – Where to start?
Before implementing quality improvements healthcare leaders need to analyse their current patient data and their outcomes to identify areas to improve.
From these results you can create a plan to reduce and achieve your quality improvements according to your initiatives. By being more prepared, hospitals can be more fully equipped to manage large-scale emergencies more effectively.
At the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic hospitals across the world were using quality improvements to adjust methods of care to reduce deaths, readmissions and shorten waiting times.
A survey questioning 225 quality improvement programs showed that 51% of respondents said quality improvement had been important during Covid-19 and the remaining 41% said the improvement of models and approaches increased organisation during the pandemic.
Steps to create effective quality improvements in healthcare:
To create and establish effective quality improvements in healthcare appropriate resources, skills, and careful consideration is needed:
- Identify the quality issue
- Ensure the problem is understood under a range of perspectives with emphasis on using and interpreting data
- Develop a theory change
- Identify and test potential solutions using data to measure the impact of each test to refine the solution to the problem
- Implement the solution and ensure that the intervention is sustained as part of standard practice
Examples of quality improvements in healthcare:
- Shorten the average length of hospital stays
- Reduce postoperative infections
- Reduce hospital readmissions
- Improve patient records by using electronic patient records to quickly update whenever and wherever you need
Tips on having effective healthcare quality improvements:
- Make sure every decision will benefit patients – the Health Foundation found if doctors took a bit more time in understanding what patients wanted their outcomes would be higher. Patients rated personal and communication skills more important than a doctor’s technical competence.
- All members of the team must know all the dimensions of the quality improvement initiative and what they are doing to achieve it.
- The team must have an effective infrastructure including the leadership, policies and procedures to organise the team effectively.
- Focus on your data – what is working? What isn’t working? How can we improve it?
- Establish baselines so your team knows what they need to achieve.
- Integrate the quality improvements in day-to-day tasks so improving standards and quality of care is at the front of every task a staff member does.
- Have a good system to measure your healthcare data and quality improvements – understand the difference between intended and unintended data variations to compare results effectively
Quality Improvement in healthcare – the frameworks
When quality improvements in healthcare have frameworks that effectively measure the data, patient outcomes improve dramatically. It can change the way a hospital works from internal culture to patient care.
There are many types of processes and models that can be used for quality improvement in healthcare. Some of these, such as the NHS evaluation of Lean or Plan, Do, Study, Act originated in the world of business but have since been put to good use in healthcare.
The Health Foundation have created their own guidebook to quality improvement in healthcare, Quality Improvement Made Simple, which contains more extensive guidance that can help you implement quality improvement processes.
Summarising quality improvements in healthcare
Quality improvement of course comes in many forms. It will typically take the shape of continuous cycles of improvement. The cycle typically proceeds as follows; processes and ways of working are assessed for possible beneficial changes, changes are made, the impact of those changes are assessed, and further alterations are made if needed, with the process repeating continuously.
However, improvements in quality can also come in the form of more fundamental transitions. Implementing the right technology can transform the way your organisation functions for the better.
Replacing paper patient records, spreadsheets, or non-clinical systems with electronic patient records is a shift organisations are making to improve efficiency and patient outcomes. Using electronic patient records allows you to manage data efficiently to provide better, safer and patient-centred care.
Discover the benefits electronic patient records can give you, to help achieve better quality improvements and increase standards further.