Quality Assurance (QA) and Continuous Quality Improvement Planning 

Quality Assurance (QA) and Continuous Quality Improvement Planning 

In the past seven weeks, you have been introduced to the concepts, models, and tools often used in healthcare quality efforts. You have also been introduced to the concept of the role internal and external factors play in shaping the healthcare quality standard of an organization. Despite all of these and despite the depth of experience you will bring to the table, healthcare organizations will continue to experience failure points across the healthcare enterprise. For example, healthcare facilities can experience an unexplained high rate of infection or a sentinel event and/or facilities may also have trouble satisfying the needs of its customers or healthcare providers. No matter the situation, as a healthcare administrator or manager, you will continue to be faced with healthcare quality-related challenges—and you will be expected to do something about it.

One way to improve this situation is to implement a project improvement program that is far reaching across the organization. One of the prerequisites of having a successful project improvement plan is to have a well-thought-out plan that can guide the development, implementation, and evaluation of project improvement action plan.

This thought-out approach is the focus of this week:

Instructions

This week, you will develop and submit your Signature Assignment—a quality assurance and continuous improvement plan for a healthcare facility that you manage (could be fictitious). The purpose of this assignment is to demonstrate your competency in assessing healthcare quality –related issues and developing a plan of action for implementing measures for improvement.

Drawing from the activities of the past seven weeks, you will develop and submit a process improvement plan using the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) resource. Make sure you review the Signature Assignment roadmap (below) well in advance of completing this assignment so you can be more effective and efficient in your delivery. At a minimum, this report should have all major elements of a peer-review manuscript that includes: an introduction, structure, leadership, developing a QA plan, and implementing a QA plan.

Length: 8-12 pages, not including title and reference pages