What is Quality Improvement?
"Quality improvement is an approach to quality that originated in industry and has received increasing attention from the health care system. It is a management philosophy and system which involves management, staff and health professionals in the continuous improvement of work processes to achieve better outcomes of patient/client/resident care. It involves the application of statistical methods and group process tools to reduce waste, duplication, and unnecessary complexity in work. The goal of CQI is to consistently meet or exceed the needs of patients, families, staff, health professionals and the community" (Health Canada, 2000).
Quality improvement as a management method seeks to develop the organization in a new way so that, in an orderly and planned fashion, "everyone at all levels can play an active role in understanding problems and the processes of work that underlie them, collecting and analyzing data on those processes, generating and testing hypotheses about the causes of flaws, and designing, implementing, and testing remedies " (Berwick et al, 1990).
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