QI Plan- Part 2- For Respect Writer

A quality improvement plan (QIP) is a formal pledge to quality improvement, aligned with the system and provincial priorities. In this QI plan for Baido Health Care, this paper will help identify the areas to improve and explain the laid down mechanisms that will help the organization attain both short and long-term improvement goals.

Quality improvement in Baido Health Care can be done in the following areas: system performance, professional development and patient outcome. These three areas are interlinked and therefore they should work together for the best results. The professionals in this healthcare must be well qualified for their respective jobs and also be linguistically and culturally competent so as to offer equal medical services to all the patients without bias or disparity. Improved patient outcome will be realized when the health providers offer quality medical care to the patients hence boosting their health. The overall effect will lead to a better system performance, which is efficient, effective, accessible and safe.

In order to monitor improvement in the above mentioned area, data is crucial for the assessment. These are also known as performance indicators and they include:

Engagement rates- this is a crucial performance measure and involves clinic's rate of engagement for new clients. Initially, many patients show enthusiasm for treatment during their first session. However, they drop out within the succeeding two or three appointments. This can be due to financial or clinical reasons and therefore it can be used to measure the effectiveness of the program and clinicians in engaging their clients. When a client drops out he/she misses an opportunity for a better outcome as retention has shown improved long-term outcomes (Honoré, et al., 2007). Frequency of measuring the engagement rate is directly proportional to improved tracking of performance by staff and management.

Attendance rate- this data shows the ratio of attended sessions to the total scheduled sessions of a given patient. High or low attendance rate may suggest that some treatment strategies are more or less effective for the patients and improvements are required in some areas. Also, the competence of the counselors involved is to be put into question when the data suggest otherwise and this information is crucial to improve the system performance (Riegelman, 2008).

Retention rates- this indicates the percentage of patients who continue their treatment. When high it suggests improved program outcome and success in having high engagement rates.

Finally, abstinence rates are another major data required for measuring the quality improvement in a clinic setup (Riegelman, 2008).

Several tools are used to collect the above data in health care setups. They are survey tools, medical tools and online tools. There are two types of survey tools that are commonly used in health care; questionnaires and interviews. Questionnaires can either be paper or electronic instruments that the respondent completes independently (Spath, 2014). Interviews are performed with the respondent face-to-face or over the phone and it is the responsibility of the interviewer to document the respondent’s comments (Spath, 2014). When using questionnaires are questions are designed in such a way to allow the responders to give their opinion on a particular issue such as client satisfaction with respect to medical care provided. One of the weaknesses of questionnaires is that the respondent could face topics that are uncomfortable to answer directly, hence give false information. Surveys can be inflexible and are not ideal for contentious issues. On the other hand, they are easy to administer and also cost effective (cheap).

Another tool used is medical tools which collect data on the patients' physiological responses so as to check their treatment progress. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines and electrocardiograms are the most commonly used tools in hospitals. They are used to check the electromagnetic signals and the body structure of a given patient.

Daily count of inpatients and outpatients will also be done under this tool. Physical discomfort is a problem related to this tool, hence a weakness. Also, these methods require expensive instruments. The advantage is that, they are accurate and do not interfere with the treatment progress of the patient.

Finally, information from the internet is also a part of data collection tools. It will require the use of online data collection tools. They will contribute in information probing and storage. These tools are very fast and easy to use. They are also cheap compared to medical tools. However, they require internet connectivity. Also, it calls in for skilled personnel in information search and retrieval, such as experts from the Statistical Packages for the Social Sciences (SPSS) and other statistics compared applications.

The control chart and histogram are two tools that are used in measuring and displaying quality improvement data collected. Control chart is also known as statistical process control and is used to illustrate how the process changes over time. It compares present or current data to previous control limits and hence concludes whether there is controlled process variation or it is unpredictable due to some underlying factors. These charts are used in pairs and different parts of the chart display a particular phenomenon, i.e. top chart shows the average while the bottom chart will monitor the range. For example, the data collected on patient retention, the average will be where there is clustering while range will be indicated by the tightness of the clusters.

Control charts can give a false alarm by showing that the process is out of control when it's not. Flawed assumptions can ruin the credibility of the control chart. Another weakness is that they require special training as they are not easy to develop and finally misplaced control limits are likely to spoil the chart. This chart provides information necessary for improvement of the phenomena addressed. It does not affect the production as there are fewer interruptions during its analysis.

A histogram is a tool used to display the center, dispersion, and shape of the sharing of a collection of performance data (Spath, 2014). It looks like a pie chart, but the differences between them are important. It's commonly used in showing the frequency distribution of a given data set or how common a value occurs in a given set. Continuous data are presented in ordered columns. The benefits of this tool are that it is visually strong, hence easy to interpret and can be compared to the normal curve. Its drawbacks include its difficulty to compare two sets of data and the fact that it uses continuous data only. Due to its grouping into categories this tool does not allow for reading of exact values.

These tools both present their data in graph mode and depend on numerical data. Both represent continuous data to show a particular trend or improvement. However, histograms are unable to compare two data sets while control charts have this as its expertise area. In health care organizations, there are several tools are crucial to improve performance and help identify progress of quality improvement plan sets (Kerner, et al., 2005).

References

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Kerner, J., Rimer, B., & Emmons, K. (2005). Introduction to the special section on

dissemination—dissemination research and research dissemination: How can we close the

gap? Health Psychology, 24, 443–446.

Riegelman, R.K. (2008) Undergraduate public health education: Past, present, and future.

American Journal of Preventive Medicine, 35, 258–263.

Spath, P. (2014). Introduction to healthcare quality management (2nd ed.). Chicago, IL: Health

Administration Press.