Incorporating Quality Improvement Concepts and Practice into a Community Health Nursing Course

Abstract

<H4>ABSTRACT</H4><p>Community health nursing students learned to incorporate continuous quality improvement (CQI) methods in their community health clinical settings. With the help of faculty guides, the students, clinical faculty, and key personnel from the community site collaborated on improvement projects that contributed to the agency's ongoing mission. Successful implementation of the CQI principles improved clinical operations, as well as patient care. In addition, the projects contributed to improved student and faculty satisfaction with the overall community experience. Students completed the projects and their clinical rotation with a sense of making a genuine contribution to the agency, and faculty reflected that the students were more engaged and invested in the project outcomes.</p><h4>AUTHORS</h4><p>Received: February 16, 2005</p><p>Accepted: June 30, 2005</p><p>Ms. Teeley is Clinical Assistant Professor, Dr. Lowe is Associate Professor and Chair, Health Care Administration, Dr. Beal is Professor and Associate Dean, Department of Nursing, and Ms. Knapp is Lecturer, Health Care Administration, Simmons College, School for Health Studies, Boston, Massachusetts.</p><p>Address correspondence to Karen H. Teeley, MS, RN, AHN-C, Clinical Assistant Professor, Simmons College, School for Health Studies, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02071; e-mail: <a href='mailto:teeley@simmons.edu'>teeley@simmons.edu</a>.</p>

Knowledge, practice and faith on Total Quality Management principles among workers in the Health Care System: Evidence from an Italian investigation

“…If the need for investment on TQM in health care is clearly recognized [26–28], it is not always easy to monitor its effective degree of penetration within the institution. Nevertheless, routine and cost‐effective methods for such purposes are recognized to be a primary need [29]: the novel instrument, the TQT, which we propose, is a possible step in this direction.…”

Planning and implementing quality improvement projects in clinical practice: Third‐year nursing students’ learning experiences

“…Health professionals need to 'know how to assess scientific evidence to determine what constitutes good care, identify gaps between good care and care delivered in their setting, and implement actions to close the gaps' (Sherwood, 2012a:8). Cummings and Worley (2015) Scholars emphasise the importance of student nurse participation in quality improvement for the development of quality and safety in nursing, to make them more aware of the importance of improvement work and better prepared to practise as nurses (Christie et al, 2012;Cronenwett et al, 2007;Jones et al, 2013;Sherwood, 2012b;Sherwood & Drenkard, 2007;Teeley et al, 2006). Several authors suggest that enquiry-based approaches are well suited for students to participate in quality improvement projects (Blessinger & Carfora, 2014;Fung, 2017) and emphasise the importance of developing meaningful questions and being able to determine resources, knowledge and actions to answer those questions.…”