Successful performance improvement

Abstract

NURSE PRACTITIONERS (NPs) are expanding their role beyond primary care, and preoperative assessment is one area in which existing medical and nursing models of care could be merged to create a specialty role for NPs. THIS ARTICLE REVIEWS health‐related literature regarding the impact of NPs in the preoperative assessment setting and explores the potential for this emerging role as an alternative to existing preoperative assessment models. AORN J 82 (November 2005) 825–834.

Improving Cardiovascular Disease Screening in Community Mental Health Centers

“…The necessity for continuous performance improvement in health care has long been recognized by the Joint Commission on Accreditation of Healthcare Organizations (1994), whose standards have placed significant emphasis upon the analysis and systematic improvement of process using the FOCUS‐PDCA model, a conceptual framework created by the Hospital Corporation of America to structure continuous quality improvement (Redick, 1999). As shown in Table 1, each letter of the model's acronym represents a step in the quality improvement process: Find a process to improve, Organize a team, Clarify current knowledge of the process, Understand causes of process variation, Select the process to improve, Plan the improvement, Data collection, Check data for process improvement, and Act to continue improvement (Baker, 2002; Ramsey, Ormsby, & Marsh, 2000; Redick, 1999).…”