Quality Management in Healthcare

Question by Professor:

Why should Public Health Organizations have a CQI program?

What are the risk and benefits?

Please provide examples.

Student: Eric Harris Jr

1. Why should Public Health Organizations have a CQI program?

2. What are the risk and benefits?

A CQI program would help a public health agency for various reasons. Public health is a complicated sector that works in tandem with health care, and the need to enhance systems and quality of treatment in this field is equally as vital as it is in health care. Any public health organization would benefit from a continuing commitment to assessing outcomes and making community health changes. CQI technologies may enhance reaction time to public health concerns by increasing efficiency. Accreditation programs have considerably aided in adopting CQI programs in public health, which may contribute to this profession's stronger quality improvement culture.

Another essential point is that most of the literature I discovered indicated that success with CQI in the public health arena is linked to leadership and top management support. Research that included ten public health organizations in a quality improvement process and graded them based on the created culture of quality improvement. They discovered that the agencies with the strongest quality improvement projects had strong leadership backing, which resulted in more trained personnel and more formal meetings among quality improvement professionals.

One disadvantage of CQI in public health is that it has not been well investigated. Research that was carried out in collaboration with Canadian public health units. These key informants were questioned about their experiences using CQI tools. According to the study, leadership involvement and organizational culture were facilitators for CQI deployment in this region. However, they did come upon certain roadblocks, including issues with performance monitoring and management discretion.

References:

M. GoodStadt and B. Kahan (1999). Can CQI lead to better health promotion and continuous

quality improvement outcomes? Promotion of International Health.

J. McCalman, R. Bailie, R. Bainbridge, K. McPhail-Bell, N. Percival, D. Askew, and K. They are

among those who have contributed to this work (2018). A Systematic Approach to

Continuous Quality Improvement and Comprehensive Primary Health Care

Student: Bailey Davis

Public Health Organizations would benefit from the use of CQIs for many reasons. CQIs will ensure that the Public Health Organizations are fostering the appropriate measures to determine any aspects in which there is an area of opportunity for improvement in regards to the services being provided. This can show that the organization would need to provide more informational services in order to provide the staff with the necessary knowledge to administer the needed level of care. CQIs would also point out any areas in which managerial roles or positions are falling through and there needs to be improvement. A need for an increase of organization among the infrastructure would also be depicted with the aid if a CQI.

CQIs in Public Health Organizations prove to result in more positive outcomes. They also increase the development of human resources amongst the community as a whole. This will allow for an increase of personnel to serve the community as assessed. CQIs in public health also help filter through procedures that would best support the health of the community (Fifolt et al., 2021).

A downfall to CQIs within public health is the accessibility of instances that appropriately depict performance overall. This is due to the variability among various population outcomes. Health outcomes are not determined by just one factor. The factors that control health outcomes also cannot be controlled necessarily which can lead to difficulty to actually assessing these measurements. Especially because the information of a CQI is dependent on the actuality of performance measurements (Price et al., 2017). CQIs can result in respondent bias. This is due to the fact that there is a sense of pressure among the participants to respond in a certain way or manner in order to be seen as though the organization is performing to the best of their abilities already (Counte & Meurer, 2001).

Counte, M. A., & Meurer, S. (2001). Issues in the assessment of continuous quality improvement implementations in health care organizations. International Journal for Quality in Health Care. 13(3).

Fifolt, M., Arbour, M., Johnson, H. H., Johns, E., & Preskitt, J. (2021). Advancing quality improvement in public health by exploring cqi in alabama's home visiting program. Journal of public health management and practice : JPHMP, 28(1), E33–E36. https://doi.org/10.1097/PHH.0000000000001080

Price, A., Schwartz, R., Cohen, J., Manson, H., & Scott, F. (2017). Assessing continuous quality improvement in public health: Adapting lessons from healthcare. Évaluation de l'amélioration continue de la qualité en santé publique: adapter les leçons des services de santé. Healthcare policy = Politiques de sante, 12(3), 34–49.