Continuous and Quality and Improvement

Continuous and Quality and Improvement is a concept that came out of the business industry. Rather than creating a culture of blame if things do not go well, the focus is on a team approach to improvement that rewards the group when things get better. Continuous and Quality and Improvement has been adapted for health care in several ways. One acronym for this is FOCUS-PDCA work:

First, FOCUS on a particular issue.

• Find a process to improve
• Organize to improve a process
• Clarify what is known
• Understand variation
• Select a process improvement

Then, move through a process improvement plan, PDCA

• Plan: create a timeline of resources, activities, training and target dates. Develop a data collection plan, the tools for measuring outcomes, and thresholds for determining when targets have been met.
• Do: implement interventions and collect data.
• Check: analyze results of data and evaluate reasons for variation.
• Act: act on what is learned and determine next steps. If the intervention is successful, work to make it part of standard operating procedure. If it is not successful, analyze sources of failure, design new solutions and repeat the PDCA cycle.

Principles of Continuous and Quality and Improvement: The principles of Continuous and Quality and Improvement are nothing but a shift from a focus on the end product or service to process.

• The customer as a vague concept to the customer as a specific person or group with specific needs
• Quality being the responsibility of the quality department to quality being the responsibility of every employee
• Individual effort to a balance between individual and team effort
• Decisions based upon opinion and "gut feeling" to decisions based on objective data
• Management-imposed decisions to total employee involvement decisions
• "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" to "if it ain't broke, you're not looking hard enough"

In addition to paid services and software there are few good resources from where you can obtain all the useful information at no cost. One such source is Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) Server, Department of Industrial Engineering, Clemson University. This service is provided in support of world-wide efforts in quality improvement and education in quality. Most files in this server may be freely distributed; some are identified within the files as restricted in some way.