Patient Safety in Psychiatry-1.9 Quality Improvements

Video Transcription

Section 9 is quality improvement. Quality improvement is an ongoing activity intended to be done continuously in order to improve patient outcome and the quality of care.  All who work in healthcare should be interested in quality and in the ongoing improvement of quality.  A quality improvement project can be initiated after an adverse event has occurred or prospectively.  When embarking on a quality improvement project, one might ask what is the model for improvement  that one seeks, what are some key questions that will guide your activity, to think about  effective statements that you're aiming towards, and to list characteristics of the measures being sought in the quality improvement project.  A quality improvement project usually includes four stages, plan, do, study, act. One should identify the tools that will be used at the various stages of the PDSA cycle,  to recognize strategies for identifying changes that may lead to improvement, and to apply those QI principles to patient safety.  It's helpful for everyone to learn about the science of improvement, and improvement is not simply something that occurs in healthcare, but this includes appreciating the system,  understanding variations and how those work, predicting changes, and thinking about psychology in terms of how humans will react to change.  Think about what you're trying to accomplish, how will you know if you've reached that accomplishment, and what changes you will see.  Things that can be changed include elimination of waste, improvement of workflow, management of variations, or other creations of a system that will avoid mistakes.  Doing root cause analyses can help to find continuous methods, can be used continuously to find problems, but that isn't necessarily the best way.  Other ways of doing quality improvement can include prospective attempts to change work in these various areas.

Video Summary

The video discusses the concept of quality improvement in healthcare, emphasizing the importance of continuously improving patient outcomes and the quality of care. It suggests that quality improvement projects can be initiated after adverse events or proactively. The four stages of a quality improvement project are identified as plan, do, study, and act. The video also mentions the need to learn about the science of improvement and understanding the healthcare system, variations, and psychology. The goal is to identify changes that lead to improvement and consider various areas such as waste elimination, workflow improvement, and managing variations. Root cause analyses are one method but not the only one for finding problems and implementing continuous improvement. Prospective attempts to change work in different areas are also mentioned.

Keywords

quality improvement

healthcare

patient outcomes

adverse events

continuous improvement