Assignment Instructions
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. If you are new to health care, select a nurse practice issue and discuss how you would apply CQI to address the issue. Discuss a quality improvement method that could be used to support CQI in your example.
Sample Answer
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.
Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) in the project refers to the improvement of the processes that result in enhanced patient care and patient safety. The major goal of CQI is to improve regulatory compliance, work environment, system processes, outcomes, and processes. Process improvement can be gradual in nature and it involves definition of the problems, benchmarking, and goal setting. In nursing practice, CQI is used to improve the occurrence of Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAIs) (O'Donnell & Gupta, 2020). There is a need for the CQI project that improve nurses' and healthcare providers' compliance with activities that improve hand hygiene. In a CQI on hand hygiene, the first step will be gathering data on the compliance rate of the nurses and this will be done by recording non-compliance instances and observing the staff. This information will be crucial in identifying the interventions such as nurses' training that will be essential in enhancing hand hygiene.
If you are new to health care, select a nurse practice issue and discuss how you would apply CQI to address the issue.
One of the nursing practice issues that would require CQI is fall prevention among the elderly. Falls are common among the elderly and they result in to reduced quality of life. The occurrence of falls results in adverse physical and psychological effects. Of worth noting, that falls are preventable and this can be done by educating the nurses and patients on the risk factors of falls and fall prevention strategies.
Discuss a quality improvement method that could be used to support CQI in your example.
The quality improvement method that will support the CQI on the reduction of HAIs is the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycle. Planning involves the development of the interventions that are necessary in improving hand hygiene and they include training nurses on hand hygiene. Doing is the implementation of the intervention but on a small scale. The study involves measuring the effect of the intervention on compliance with hand hygiene and the act, involves refining the intervention for wide implementation (Chen et al., 2021).
References
Chen, Y., VanderLaan, P. A., & Heher, Y. K. (2021). Using the model for improvement and plan‐do‐study‐act to effect smart change and advance quality. Cancer cytopathology, 129(1), 9-14. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Yael-Heher/publication/343433292_Using_the_Model_for_Improvement_and_Plan-Do-Study-Act_to_effect_SMART_change_and_advance_quality/links/63fcdf7f0d98a97717c15c36/Using-the-Model-for-Improvement-and-Plan-Do-Study-Act-to-effect-SMART-change-and-advance-quality.pdf
O'Donnell, B., & Gupta, V. (2020). Continuous quality improvement. NCBI. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK559239/