Improving Apparent Cause Analysis Reliability: A Quality Improvement Initiative

Improving Fellows’ Presentations at Case-Conference: A Quality Improvement Initiative

Improving the quality of telephone-delivered health care: a national quality improvement transformation initiative.

BACKGROUND Many Veterans Affairs (VA) primary care (PC) patients prefer telephone-delivered care to other health care delivery modalities. OBJECTIVE To evaluate PC patients' telephone experiences and outcomes before and after a national telephone transformation quality improvement (QI) collaborative. METHODS Cross-sectional surveys were conducted pre- and post-collaborative. We used bivaria...

Predicting Colonoscopy Time: A Quality Improvement Initiative

BACKGROUND/AIMS There is lack of consensus on the optimal time allotted for colonoscopy, which increases patient wait times. Our aim was to identify and quantify the individual pre-procedural factors that determine the total procedure time (TPT) of colonoscopy. METHODS This retrospective study involved 4,494 subjects, undergoing outpatient colonoscopy. Effects of age, sex, body mass index, ab...

Using a common cause strategy for quality improvement: improving hypnotic prescribing in general practice within a Quality Improvement Collaborative.

A common cause strategy is an essential conceptual approach for understanding variation and what might be contributing to it as well as informing the redesign of processes and systems to reduce inappropriate and unintended variation. This article describes what a common cause strategy for improvement is and the steps required for this approach. We describe a practical example of how this is ap...

Improving inpatient postnatal services: midwives views and perspectives of engagement in a quality improvement initiative

BACKGROUND Despite major policy initiatives in the United Kingdom to enhance women's experiences of maternity care, improving in-patient postnatal care remains a low priority, although it is an aspect of care consistently rated as poor by women. As part of a systems and process approach to improving care at one maternity unit in the South of England, the views and perspectives of midwives respo...