Quality Measures & Quality Improvement Project
A Quality Improvement and Patient Safety (QPS) Programme mission is to provide management oversight to ensure excellent person-centred care and satisfaction through clinical innovation, multidisciplinary cooperation and collaboration. While the governing entity of the organisation approves the QPS programme and leadership provides resources to implement the programme, it takes daily capable guidance and management at every level to carry out the programme and make continuous improvements, part of the fabric of how the hospital meets its mission and strategic priorities. 2019 has been a busy but productive year for Quality and Patient Safety in the Galway Clinic. Moving forward, year 2020 has a lot to offer Galway Clinic Staff to initiative & establish quality improvement projects and continue existing project in place for continuous quality improvement and patient safety.
The Galway Clinic empowers staff to enact change through the quality programme which provides guidance and assistance to ensure the best possible outcome through personal learning and a sense of achievement. Improving quality is about making healthcare safe effective, person-centred, timely efficient and effective. Each quality improvement in the organisation is grounded in one of two frameworks; Plan Do Study Act (IHI) or Lean Six Sigma; Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control (DMAIC).
Achieving and sustaining quality and performance improvement in a complex healthcare environment is challenging but rewarding. Studies have shown that engagement of frontline staff in the work of identifying, designing, testing and implementing new processes and methods can be very effective in outcome measures and we hope to relate these outcomes directly back to the patient. Our newly developed Patient Satisfaction Programme will demonstrate the effectiveness of this engagement.
Quality Measures are tools that help us measure or quantify healthcare processes, outcomes, patient perceptions, and organizational structure and/or systems that are associated with the ability to provide high-quality health care and/or that relate to one or more quality goals for health care. These goals include: effective, safe, efficient, patient-centred, equitable, and timely care. In developing a quality measure, it must be tested to ensure that it is: Reliable -Use of the tool results in the same reading regardless of who does the measuring or when and where the measurement is taken. Valid -The tool measures what is intended. Standardized - Definitions of data elements, data collection, and data analyses are sufficiently precise and comprehensible that they can be understood and applied in the same way regardless of who refers to or applies them.
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are the critical (key) indicators of progress toward an intended result. KPI’s provide a focus for strategic and operational improvement, create an analytical basis for decision making and help focus attention on what matters most.
Quality Measurements includes: Values, Numbers, Rates, Percentage, Average, Turn-Around-Times, Costs, Availability, Speed, Deficiencies, Deliquencies, Defects, Breakdowns and other functional areas measuring structure, process and outcomes. For more information about the Galway Clinic Quality Improvement Book, kindly contact Patient Safety Executive Ms. Alyson Banks 091785420.
The following significant QI Projects were presented to International Meetings, Educational Programmes, Studies and Research which brought recognition, pride & greatness to Galway Clinic:
- Procedural Sedation and Analgesia (PSA) – A new QQI Level 9 Education Program for Registered Nurses in collaboration between GMIT & Galway Clinic
- A multidisciplinary approach to reconciling medication errors in a Private Hospital in the West of Ireland
- Investigating the patient radiation dose reduction of new PETCT scanner
- The Development of a Robotic Assisted Radical Protatectomy Guideline
- Capnographapy Training
- The Impact of Body Mass Index on Safe Procedural Sedation and Analgesia
- A comparison of Patient long term outcomes, six months post Rapid Recovery Programme for patients post Primary Total Hip Replacement (THR) Arthroplasty.
