Discussion: Improving a Healthcare Situation

Healthcare organizations, by their nature, must constantly strive to improve quality of patient care. Many different approaches to improvement have been utilized over the years. The Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle (PDSA) is a useful tool that has been used by hundreds of healthcare organizations for testing proposed changes. In addition to PDSA, there are other valuable quality improvement techniques that may be used in the healthcare setting (such as Force Field Analysis, Fishbone, SBAR, 5 Whys, etc.).

In this Discussion, you will evaluate a situation and apply an improvement plan using the PDSA cycle. You will also apply other quality improvement techniques to healthcare situations.

To prepare for this Discussion:

• Review this week’s Learning Resources and specifically focus on Chapter 5 of the course text.
• Select or create a specific healthcare situation that needs improvement. Some examples could be:
  • Patient no-shows for doctor’s appointments
  • Equipment “parked” and obstructing hospital hallways
  • Volunteers forgetting to wash their hands before transporting patients to radiology.

By Day 4

Post a comprehensive response that includes the following:

• Describe the healthcare situation that you selected or created.
• Explain the current process in the healthcare situation that you have selected or created.
• Identify the necessary improvements required for the healthcare situation that you have selected or created. Explain why.
• Describe what you will measure to track improvement.
• Define what data should be collected in order to determine if your intervention resulted in an improvement for the healthcare situation.
• Utilize the Plan, Do, Study, Act cycle (PDSA)
  • Describe one full PDSA cycle of the situation that you have selected or created.
  • Display the PDSA cycle of your situation in a table format.