Continuous quality improvement in nursing is a pathway of improving healthcare delivery by identifying gaps, implementing and monitoring corrective measures and studying its effectiveness. It is also the method of continuously examining the efficiency and developing the results of procedures or care provided to deliver service in healthcare. McBride and Tietze (2016) explain that nurses get involved in quality improvement as a means of improving services provided to the patients, and studies show that it is the best method of building competency in nursing. The goal of continuous quality improvement is to increase the quality of care delivery and also build efficiency into procedures and processes in nursing.
Quality improvement is always thought to cover problems in healthcare than providing solutions. However, if you look at the quality improvement from a broad perspective, it helps more in bettering services and making them more applicable.
As a registered nurse, I have provided care to patients, and quality improvement has enabled me to offer better services before. I am taking an example of blood sugar testing in in-patient diabetic patients to explain how quality improvement assessment can help in the faster control of sugar levels. The first step is planning on how the process is going to be improved (McBride and Tietze, 2016). With experience, nurses check blood sugar levels before administering medication. However, conduction of routine checkups before intake of meals and medication administration will help control sugar levels in diabetic patients. The second step is putting the changes into small-scale trials. For the diabetic case, coming up with a checkup chart showing the sugar levels before eating and also before administration of anti-diabetics will help monitor the efficiency of the programme. The third part is checking if the process under study is yielding results. I will make a comparison between those patients under my quality improvement plan and the control patients.
The last part of the continuous quality improvement is applying the change. If the change is working, a large-scale implementation is recommended. For my case, if the charts turn out to control blood sugar levels efficiently, then the management is made aware so that the change is implemented. When the process fails, refinement can be done, or the cycle is started again until an improved quality of care is achieved.
Reference
McBride, S., & Tietze, M. (2016). Nursing informatics for the advanced practice nurse: Patient safety, quality, outcomes, and interprofessionalism. New York, NY: Springer Publishing Company, LLC.
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