Paper on Quality Improvement Tools in Healthcare: Assessing and Enhancing Service Quality

Introduction

Quality is essential to every sector; it is the extent to which a product, process, or service satisfies a specified set of requirements. The customer experiences the effects of quality. When it comes to quality in healthcare care, the patients who are attended by the healthcare professionals stand out well in giving their feedback on how they perceive a particular service or process. In this case, various tools are used that health care professionals get into a position to assess their services as well as the process. There are various inputs required. In this case, every healthcare professional has a mandate to collect data to analyze it and get a clear understanding of the customer's perception of the process or the service. When considering quality in health care, there are specific healthcare goals that are taken into consideration, which include: patient-centered, timely care, equitable, safe effective.

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Quality Measurement/Improvement Tools

Quality improvement tools are self-governing procedures and processes that help one better comprehend, examine, or communicate quality improvement effects. On the other hand, quality improvement is a systematic formal technique for examining practice performance and efforts to upgrade performance (Koetsier et al., 2012). These quality measurement tools include:

The Standard Operating Procedures Action planning tool is designed for users of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality on patient safety culture. The toolkit gives step-to-step guidelines to enable survey users to enhance an action plan to refine patient safety culture (Kaplan et al., 2012). It enables an organization to document goals, initiatives, processes, and outcome measures through a template. It enables nursing homes, pharmacies, medical offices, and hospitals to evaluate how the staff perceives different positions of patient safety culture. Patient safety culture is crucial since it defines the standard that a given healthcare facility outlines as it offers its services to consumers. The healthcare workers, in this case, the clinical officers or nurses are given step-by-step guidance on how to improve the patient safety culture. The information obtained by the survey through the aid of this tool is used by healthcare organizations that are in dire need to enhance the patient safety culture. The same information collected is used as the starting point to achieve changes in the culture.

End-Stage Renal Diseases Facilities Toolkit is a quality improvement tool that aids clinics in end-stage renal disease to hamper healthcare-related infections in dialysis patients. Patients with renal diseases are delicate, and healthcare providers have the mandate to ensure that they give the best care. The tool aids dialysis care clinicians in making care safer by following clinical best practices and generating a safety culture using audit toolkits and checklists while being part of the patients and their families. The best experience a family member encounters in cases where they have a sick patient is the engagement, they get from healthcare clinicians (Kaplan et al., 2012). In cases where family members have a renal disease patient, it is stressful, having a health care attendant who engages them from time to time gives them hope while in the same case wiping the stressful images in their minds. The toolkit comprises modules that the facilitator uses to expound to members of a dialysis center specific means to come up with a culture of safety.

Health Literacy Universal Precautions toolkit enables essential care practitioners to minimize the complexity of healthcare while increasing patient comprehension of health knowledge and, at the same time, facilitating support for all health literacy levels. Most patients, at times, experience difficulties in understanding health information and accessing health services. The provisions are directed at making the healthcare environment more comfortable to navigate; through this, the tools patients feel free to ask for information from the healthcare professionals—the toolkit to minimize the risk of miscommunication, clarifying communication with and validating whether all patients understand. A healthcare professional's ability to break down the complicated health jargon that individual patients may not be familiar with is critical. Patients have not just been given prescriptions the art of going further to try to elucidate to a patient. The need for those prescriptions will be an essential step toward quality improvements. This toolkit gives evidence-based proof to ensure that all patients' systems are understood better, not only those requiring extra guidance (Koetsier et al., 2012). The toolkit is split into reasonable bits so that its execution can fit appropriately.

What the Quality Improvement Tools Assess

The quality improvement tools assess the establishment of a culture of quality in health professional practice. The organization process and procedures in line with the healthcare workers should integrate towards the quality improvement efforts. The quality exhibited is shown by the attitudes, the culture of practice behaviors, and actions. However, the quality improvement culture looks distinct for every practice but involves instituting committed teams, and meetings, and generating guidelines for quality improvement goals.

Quality improvement efforts are supposed to be unambiguous to staff, physicians, and patients. There is a need to involve the entire team when planning and implementing quality improvement projects while at the same time communicating the project needs, actions, and results to everyone. In cases where the project is successful, there is a need to recognize and acknowledge that success.

Data collection and analysis are at the core of quality improvement tools. The data will explain how well your systems perform, identify potential areas of enhancement, position measurable targets, and track the effectiveness of change. Most decisions in quality improvement projects base their foundations on the analysis made.

How These Tools Measure Quality

The action plan tool weighs on the patient safety culture. Every healthcare organization develops a framework to ensure that every staff in the organization is aware of the safety culture and is mandated to implement the said framework (Kaplan et al., 2012). The attitudes, behaviors, and actions are supposed to reflect ensuring that the safety culture has adhered to detail. The quality improvement tools will help an administrative health professional at the managerial level track whether the set guidelines and policies are adhered to. Data collected and analyzed will guide the administrative professional to assess how the process is fairing. In the cases of a clinical officer, he or she will use the action plan tool to assess quality by ensuring as he undertakes his routine duties, patient safety is taken into consideration. A physician, on the other hand, is mandated to maintain and restore health, the action plan tool is crucial since he gets first-hand information from the patient.

The end-stage renal disease facilities toolkit allows health professionals to create a safety culture using checklists and audit tools. Since the fact that patients that suffer from renal diseases are delicate, these tools assess quality by ensuring that there are no healthcare-associated infections. In the case of an administrative healthcare professional, this tool is crucial since it will act as guidance in assessing the cases of infections associated with procedures that a patient gets. Audit tools used to monitor patients' health from the day of admission strictly will be critical factors in assessing quality. When the patient gets to the clinical provider, the physician maintains checklists to ensure that they keep a close check on the changes occurring in the patient. Using the tool, the quality of the services offered will guide healthcare professionals on their performance.

The health literacy universal precautions toolkit aims at reducing the complexity of health care. When it comes to an administrative health care officer, this tool will be crucial to assess whether there is proper dissemination of health information to the patients. In cases even before patients visit the clinical officers or physicians, the administration healthcare officer should ensure the required information is at the disposal of the patients. Clinical officers will assess quality using this tool by ensuring that the information passed to the patient is clear and transparent. The aspect of miscommunication should not be evident as this may shy patients away. A physician in maintaining and restoring health is mandated not to use technical jargon that may be hard for the patients to comprehend. The physician will assess quality through this tool's use by ensuring the patients are aware of the administered procedures to them.

Conclusion

In conclusion, quality is delivered when one achieves the minimum requirement of a specified outcome standard. Healthcare improvement tools provide an avenue to measure the quality of the services that a given healthcare organization offers to its customers, which in this case, are the patients.

References

Al-Abri, R., & Al-Balushi, A. (2014). Patient satisfaction survey as a tool for quality improvement. Oman Medical Journal, 29(1), 3. doi: 10.5001/omj.2014.02

Ettorchi-Tardy, A., Levin, M., & Michel, P. (2012). Benchmarking: A method for continuous quality improvement in health. Healthcare policy, 7(4), e101. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3359088/

Kaplan, H. C., Provost, L. P., Froehle, C. M., & Margolis, P. A. (2012). The model for understanding success in quality (MUSIQ): building a theory of context in healthcare quality improvement. BMJ quality & safety, 21(1), 13-20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/bmjqs-2011-000010

Koetsier, A., van der Veer, S. N., Jager, K. J., Peek, N., & de Keizer, N. F. (2012). Control charts in healthcare quality improvement. Methods of information in medicine, 51(03), 189-198. https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/ac8c/4fd2861816ff3b5ce5be4e23c93bcbc637bf.pdf