Question

Achieving and sustaining desired quality outcomes is the foundation of QI. Discuss what approach or recommendation you would make if positive outcomes are not being achieved in your organization? Relate your response to a particular problem area and use the PDSA model of improvement in your response.

Answer 1

All quality improvement processes are based on achieving the desired performance quality and sustaining it.  QI (quality improvement) is a component of performance management and its primary goal is to improve outcomes or to achieve positive outcomes in an organization. The employees, management, and the organization is expected to have positive outcomes individually and as a whole, which is not always possible. The steps of QI include identification of the issue, analysis of the issue, development of improvement solution, and implementation of the solution to see if yields improvement. If positive outcomes or improved outcomes are not achieved after implementation, then it can be assumed that something certainly went wrong in any one of the above steps. The decision to modify, abandon, or implement the solution is based on the result of implementation. Recommendations will be made to abandon or modify the process if positive outcomes are not achieved in the organization. The Plan-Do-Study-Act (PSDA), a four-stage problem-solving model for improvement of QI process can be used. The PDSA cycle can be used with internal and external customers to get feedback about what is working and what is not. For example, considering the increased patient waiting time for patients in a hospital, a QI process was implemented with PSDA cycle. This included feedback of inpatients and outpatients, which reduced the waiting time considerably.