Quality & Continuous Improvement

What is healthcare Quality Improvement (QI)?

“Quality improvement is about giving the people closest to the issues affecting care quality, the time, permission, skills and resources they need to solve them. It involves a systematic and co-ordinated approach to solving a problem using specific methods and tools, with the aim of bringing about measurable improvement”.

_{^{Quote from: Quality improvement made simple – The Health Foundation}}

What is healthcare Continuous Improvement (CI)?

“Continuous improvement is a systematic, sustainable approach to enhancing the quality of care and outcomes for patients. Building a continuous improvement culture is not a turnaround project or a quick fix but a journey which never really ends, requiring commitment, investment and persistence”.

_{^{Quote from: Continuous improvement in healthcare – KPMG Global}}

The article continues to explain that the goal of continuous improvement of healthcare services is ‘operational excellence’ – establishing a way of working which delivers improvements in care quality, patient safety and patient outcomes by the everyday use of continuous improvement techniques.

Continuous improvement is driven and owned by frontline staff of healthcare organisations, reinforced by specialised, ongoing training and supported by the entire organisation – starting with the board and the chief executive and permeating everywhere from the finance and HR departments to the IT team.

So, it is evident that there are inherent similarities between quality improvement and continuous improvement or continuous quality improvement (CQI) – terms that are used interchangeably. At the FCA our focus is not on the name or description but the definition. We believe strongly that successful improvement is underpinned by the quality of the human relationships in healthcare organisations.

Our course focuses heavily on the relational element of improvement and how it’s critical to go beyond just training people in quality improvement. To enabling them to coach others to use improvement tools and methods in real situations every week.

The FCA approach aligns well with both improvement definitions, but the continuous improvement definition in this article highlights things that we focus on. This includes; ownership from frontline healthcare delivery teams, getting ownership from the organisation and the development of leadership behaviours as well as training in the tools and methods. We believe enabling improvement in healthcare is what the FCA course, ‘Improving with people first’, and programme is all about.

Our course ‘Improving with People First’ provides healthcare providers – individuals, teams and organisations – an approach and a cohesive methodology that provides the structure and facilitates the engagement and collaboration needed to harness motivation into sustained action in the delivery of quality improvement projects. You can read about this in more detail.

You can also learn how the FCA methodology aligns with NHS IMPACT.