Quality management in health care
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Qual Manag Health Care · Oct 2011
Comparative StudyThe impact of a temporary medical ward closure on emergency department and hospital service delivery outcomes.
To describe the effect of a 3-week closure of a 28-bed medical ward on Emergency Department (ED) and hospital outcomes. ⋯ Temporarily closing a medical ward had a negative effect on some ED and hospital outcomes. When major refurbishments are required, alternative capacity measures need to be considered to minimize the impact on health service delivery and patient outcomes. Reducing elective surgery and opening replacement beds elsewhere in the hospital are possible solutions.
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Blood management is a concept that adopts a principle of improving patient outcome by integrating all available techniques to ensure safety, availability, and appropriate allocation of blood products. This constitutes a model of multidisciplinary care where the changes in culture are system directed on the basis of evidence-based medicine. ⋯ In this article, we have described our experience of creating a patient-centric, cost-effective, evidence-based, and multipronged program creation with scalable results. The use of data, education, process improvement, engagement, and accountability of caregivers have resulted in sustained results and helped in creating a comprehensive blood management program.
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Qual Manag Health Care · Oct 2011
Effect of surgical safety checklists on postoperative morbidity and mortality rates, Shiraz, Faghihy Hospital, a 1-year study.
The study intent was to (1) encourage the use of surgical safety checklists and (2) measure the effect checklists have in reducing surgical complications. ⋯ Complications decreased by 57% after intervention. Both high patient information detection and elevated levels of cooperation by surgical personnel were observed. Compliance likely helped prevent some adverse effects associated with surgery.
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Qual Manag Health Care · Oct 2011
A system for using patient complaints as a trigger to improve quality.
This study aims to explore how hospital organizations can use complaints to drive quality improvement. A teaching hospital in Taiwan was purposefully selected as a case study. Data were collected from a variety of sources, including interview with key managers and social workers, questionnaire survey of managers (n = 53), interview with government organizations (n = 4) and nongovernment organizations (n = 3), document collection and review, and the Critical Incident Technique using a questionnaire and nonparticipant observation (n = 59). ⋯ But it did not act on these complaints as a collective group to identify systemic problems and deficiencies. This approach provides single-loop learning, which may be sufficient to handle the problem on hand but is not enough to prevent such problems occurring again in the future. This study suggests some implications in regard to a best practice system for using complaints to improve quality.