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Quality Improvement

Diana Velez

Phoenix University

March 21, 2016

Quality Improvement

Patient safety is a construct of healthcare quality that defines available initiatives inhibiting the occurrence of medical errors that often lead to adverse health conditions. This is essentially a contemporary domain of healthcare that explores analysis and prevention of healthcare service provision errors that result in adverse circumstances (Milligan, 2007). The development of this domain was initiated by the different experiences in which medical errors led to adverse service provision outcomes as well as the fact that human error is a logical factor of consideration in human processes. This domain has evolved to become one of the central determinants of service quality in healthcare. As a result, health organizations are endorsing structured initiatives with the objective of guaranteeing better patient safety. In this analysis, fundamental elements defining such initiatives will be explored by describing a healthcare plan which will have the effect of improving patient safety.

Criteria and Tasks

A patient safety plan refers to a structured order of processes that ensure an improvement in the overall safety of patients in a health service provision environment. Just like any other health plan that has objectives and a pre-determined goal, authority, structure and organization play an important role in its design. While a health organization is made up of numerous levels of employees, the patient safety plan must outline the responsibilities of employees at each level (Mills, Neily, & Dunn, 2008). In this section, the contribution of each member of the organization will be explicitly discussed. To begin with, the board of directors are the epitome of authority in the organization, they are therefore centrally placed to initiate and propagate the concept of patient safety from the top of the organization. While patient safety is both a quality statistic and a culture, the board of directors and the hospital’s executive leadership must utilize their authority to cultivate patient safety as a culture and a determinant of service quality.

However, the executive leadership have a more involving responsibility in influencing service delivery in the organization. There must therefore help in the conceptualization of the patient safety plan. The design and conceptualization of this plan must be convened by the quality improvement committee. As already mentioned, patient safety is also a determining factor in quality of service delivery, the quality improvement committee must therefore take part in ensuring that the outcome of the process must ensure the required quality in patient safety. Most importantly, efficient implementation of the plan can only be achieved by decentralization of control. This gives middle management the responsibility of controlling the implementation of sections of the plan. However, it is the department staff and the medical staff that will be involved in the actual implementation of the plan. It is very important to understand that patient safety plans can be designed by both conceptualization and implementation stages. The analysis above highlights the breakdown of tasks and responsibilities as distributed within the two stages of planning and implementation.

Communication

The implementation of plans and programs especially in healthcare requires a good communication network that describes how data will be collected and reported for analysis. The management and implementation of a plan must be evaluated regularly to ensure that the required goals and objectives are met. In this plan, communication is very important as it evaluates how performance activity outcomes are communicated within the organizational structure. Depending on the hierarchy of authority and responsibilities in the patient safety plan, reports will be collected and submitted for analysis (Mills, Neily, & Dunn, 2008). Department staff and medical staff are involved in the actual implementation of the plan, they therefore collect data and submit to middle management who control the implementation at that particular level.

In this context, the middle management staff report to the audience of executive leadership and quality improvement committee. This audience is centrally placed in evaluating the progress of the plan and analyzing the extent to which the plan satisfies the set objectives. Communication at this level is very important as it validates the progress and justifies the performance of the plan. Finally, the executive leadership submits results to the board of directors who use the data to prove compliance to quality standards and develop recommendations that are implemented using the same hierarchy of responsibilities.

Education

Education refers to the intellectual know-how required for the efficient implementation of the patient safety plan. As highlighted above, different employees have varying responsibilities that must be backed with quality intellectual capability to ensure efficiency (Milligan, 2007). A successful plan must be implemented by knowledgeable employees who not only comprehend the significance of the program but also use the experience to build their skills in service delivery. As a result, the type of education offered for these employees will differ in relation to the type of responsibilities they have. Department staff and medical staff are involved in the physical realization of the patient safety plan, they therefore must be educated on the intellectual and practical prospects required in accomplishing tasks defined in the plan.

Secondly, middle managers are strategically placed to collect and disseminate performance statistics to the quality improvement committee and executive leadership. They must therefore be trained on data handling skills so that they can collect quality data and present the data in a form that can be easily understood by the leadership forum. On the other hand, the combination of executive leadership, quality improvement committee and board of directors are responsible for the conceptualization of plans and decisions from which the plan originates. They must therefore embrace quality decision making to come up with good plans. Essentially, the type of education given for each group is defined by the intellectual requirement of their respective responsibilities (Milligan, 2007).

Monitoring and Revising

This is perhaps the most important aspect of a patient safety plan. A plan must be monitored and revised to establish how best it performs in servicing the objectives. The executive leadership and the quality improvement committee are the responsible parties in monitoring and revision. Given that the plan will be evaluated annually, it is essential to establish performance parameters that can be evaluated annually. A good example is the number of medical errors. To be specific, wring prescriptions may often lead to adverse conditions that may affect the recovery process of the patient. This is one parameter that can be evaluated by determining the number of faulty prescriptions offered annually. Basically, the patient safety plan is designed to reduce the occurrence of such and more errors.

Therefore, by establishing the number of errors will depict the performance of the program in improving patient safety. Once the decision making body has received and analyzed the results, a plan is formulated that will revise and tune the original plan in alignment to the required outcome. Plans and programs must be monitored and revised regularly to validate them with respect to the changing healthcare environment. This only gives an example of a parameter that can be used, the monitoring team must come up with a number of performance parameters to help in evaluating the progress of the plan. The exclusivity of the data collected by the monitoring team will help the decision making team in properly revising the plan.

Regulatory and Accreditation

This is the last element in this plan and involves the analysis of the effect of external entities, such as governmental agencies, accrediting bodies, and professional interest groups, on the quality and performance measure of the organization's decision-making processes. To begin with, this section is dependent on the relationship between government regulations and accreditation standards in patient safety (Nieva & Sorra, 2003). The health organization must ensure that the plan demonstrates compliance to all the regulations that define standard procedures or programs in patient safety. For example, the advent of common accidents as a result of medical errors has resulted to strict government rules and accreditation regulations that health organizations must follow.

As already mentioned in the analysis, the health organization must ensure that its patient safety plan is in alignment to the regulations in which international standards are based. In conclusion, this analysis has explored some of the most important elements that define the quality of patient safety plans. While the analysis emphasizes on the significance of responsibilities and intellectual empowerment for implementation purposes, it also outlines the significance of communication, monitoring and the need to ensure compliance to government regulations and accreditation rules (Miller, et al., 2005).

References

Miller, M. R., Pronovost, P., Donithan, M., Zeger, S., Zhan, C., Morlock, L., & Meyer, G. S. (2005). Relationship between performance measurement and accreditation: implications for quality of care and patient safety. American Journal of Medical Quality, 20(5), 239-252.

Milligan, F. J. (2007). Establishing a culture for patient safety–The role of education. Nurse Education Today, 27(2), 95-102.

Mills, P., Neily, J., & Dunn, E. (2008). Teamwork and communication in surgical teams: implications for patient safety. Journal of the American College of Surgeons, 206(1), 107-112.

Nieva, V. F., & Sorra, J. (2003). Safety culture assessment: a tool for improving patient safety in healthcare organizations. Quality and Safety in Health Care, 12(suppl 2), ii17-ii23.