Continuous Quality Improvement
Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is the responsibility of all nurses and is vital when addressing the challenges of the health care industry. Provide an example of how you would apply CQI in your current or past position.
Sample Answer
Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI)
CQI is a quality management philosophy that encourages different stakeholders in an organization, including team members, employees, leaders, and management, to continuously pursue improvement (Hill et al., 2020). In the healthcare industry, CQI provides a way to evaluate consistency and success in health care facilities and in specific health programs for particular ailments and specific demographics such as elderly people, pregnant women, teenagers, and children (Hill et al., 2020). CQI, therefore, provides numerous benefits in the healthcare industry, including justifying expenses, controlling costs, and supporting excellence in healthcare delivery (McCalman et al., 2018).
In my current position as a nurse practitioner, I can apply CQI to reduce instances of hospital-acquired infections in a long-term care facility. The first step in implementing CQI in the long-term care facility will therefore be to create a team to work on reducing HAIs. The next step would be to define the primary goal of the team, which is to reduce the cases of hospital-acquired infections in the long-term care facility. This would be followed by explaining what the patients’ need, which would include positive outcomes (McCalman et al., 2018). The next step in implementing CQI in a long-term care facility would be to determine the current HAI rates in the facility. A goal of the minimum hospital-acquired infection rates in the healthcare facility would then be determined. Different approaches to reducing hospital-acquired infections would then be presented with data analysis and exploration of evidence-based culture being used to determine the most effective method of reducing hospital-acquired infections in the long-term care facility. Finally, a learning culture would be established in the longer-term care facility to teach different healthcare practitioners an effective means of reducing hospital-acquired infections. Eventually, a sustained effort to reduce HAIs in the long-term care facility would be adopted (McCalman et al., 2018).
References
- Hill, J. E., Stephani, A. M., Sapple, P., & Clegg, A. J. (2020). The effectiveness of continuous quality improvement for developing professional practice and improving health care outcomes: a systematic review. Implementation Science, 15(1). https://doi.org/10.1186/s13012-020-0975-2
- McCalman, J., Bailie, R., Bainbridge, R., McPhail-Bell, K., Percival, N., Askew, D., Fagan, R., & Tsey, K. (2018). Continuous Quality Improvement and Comprehensive Primary Health Care: A Systems Framework to Improve Service Quality and Health Outcomes. Frontiers in Public Health, 6. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2018.00076
