Kai Tiaki Nursing Research September 2012 vol 3 no 1 24 Patricia Mitchell Involving clinicians, especially nurses, is critical to improving quality in health care. In this paper, we report on a study that explored nurses’ perceptions of quality improvement (QI) change. Health care organisations and governments, both in New Zealand and other developed countries, are striving to reduce escalating...

BACKGROUND Insertion of an acupuncture needle into an acupuncture point typically generates a range of sensations called 'de qi'. Most acupuncturists are taught that obtaining de qi is important when treating patients with pain but this can be quite uncomfortable for patients. OBJECTIVE This study assesses the importance of the strength of de qi, on the clinical outcome in osteoarthritic pain...

CONTEXT Many state and local public health agencies have developed accreditation systems and are utilizing quality improvement (QI) methods and tools to improve the public health infrastructure. Development of strategies to support and build the capacity of the public health workforce to apply QI can help advance these efforts. OBJECTIVE This article describes the adaptation and creation of a...

BACKGROUND The traditional Chinese theory of acupuncture emphasizes that the intensity of acupuncture must reach a threshold to generate de qi, which is necessary to achieve the best therapeutic effect. De qi is an internal compound sensation of soreness, tingling, fullness, aching, cool, warmth and heaviness, and a radiating sensation at and around the acupoints. However, the notion that de qi...

We developed a quality indexing system to numerically qualify respiratory data collected by vital-sign monitors in order to support reliable post-hoc mining of respiratory data. Each monitor-provided (reference) respiratory rate (RR(R)) is evaluated, second-by-second, to quantify the reliability of the rate with a quality index (QI(R)). The quality index is calculated from: (1) a breath identif...

PURPOSE Quality improvement (QI) is a common competency that must be taught in all physician training programmes, yet, there is no clear best approach to teach this content in clinical settings. We conducted a realist systematic review of the existing literature in QI curricula within the clinical setting, highlighting examples of trainees learning QI by doing QI. METHOD Candidate theories de...

Quotient Image (QI) algorithm has been widely used in face recognition and rerendering under varying illumination conditions. One of the inaccuracies of QI algorithm is the assumption of ‘‘Ideal Class’’, that all faces have the same surface normal (3D shape). However, in practice this assumption is often not true. To reduce the inaccuracy, the Non-Ideal Class Non-Point Light source QI (NIC-NPL-...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE Pediatric patients are at risk for developing pressure ulcers (PUs) and associated pain, infection risk, and prolonged hospitalization. Stage III and IV ulcers are serious, reportable events. The objective of this study was to develop and implement a quality-improvement (QI) intervention to reduce PUs by 50% in our ICUs. METHODS We established a QI collaborative leade...

Disparities in pediatric health care quality are well described in the literature, yet practical approaches to decreasing them remain elusive. Quality improvement (QI) approaches are appealing for addressing disparities because they offer a set of strategies by which to target modifiable aspects of care delivery and a method for tailoring or changing an intervention over time based on data moni...