Welcome to another HiQuiPs Expert Corner. In this edition, we asked Dr. Eddy Lang three questions about Quality Improvement (QI) given his impressive track record of system improvements. Dr. Eddy Lang is the current Department Head of Emergency Medicine and a Professor at the Cumming School of Medicine, University of Calgary. In addition, he serves as the Clinical Department Head for Emergency Medicine and a senior researcher at Alberta Health Services, Calgary zone. …
Root Cause Analysis in the Time of COVID-19:
You are midway through a busy rapid response shift where you have noticed an increased response time of the hospital’s intubating teams to decompensating patients. Over the last few months, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted restructuring of the use of many spaces to accommodate the influx of patients. You understand that the system is overwhelmed but you are optimistic that you can optimize the interprofessional team’s response times. This sets off a new …
Expert’s Corner – Dr. Kaveh Shojania on Common QI Pitfalls
Welcome to another HiQuiPS post! Our series has aimed to present foundational topics in Health informatics, Quality Improvement and Patient Safety in a practical manner. In this new section – Expert’s Corner, we ask an expert some important questions to deepen our understanding of these sciences and improve our implementation. For our inaugural Expert’s Corner post, we invited Dr. Kaveh Shojania. Dr. Shojania is the Vice Chair (Quality & Innovation) in the Department …
Human-Centered Design in Healthcare
You are working a busy shift in the emergency department and are trying to quickly disposition patients. As the shift progresses and your feet hurt, you wonder why your work space is far removed from the patient care area, and different walls have bins that contain order sets, handover notes, and referral forms. Moreover, the route to sending the tube to the lab crosses too close to the dirty utility room. You think …
HiQuiPs: Preparing a QI Manuscript – the SQUIRE 2.0 Guidelines
You are planning to conduct a quality improvement project and your project supervisor has advocated that you download a copy of the SQUIRE 2.0 QI reporting guidelines before you begin. This is confusing, as it seemed to you that reporting guidelines governed how a manuscript should be drafted rather than how a project should be conducted. You decide to take a deeper dive into the SQUIRE 2.0 guidelines. Introduction: Guidelines for Conducting Research …
HiQuiPs Special Post: In Situ Simulation and High Reliability Organizations in the time of COVID-19
It has been a slower than usual night shift, and you have just led a resuscitation for a COVID-19 patient in your ED. Your ED has experienced several policy changes in recent weeks, from new standards for the use of personal protective equipment to policies for mitigating risk during aerosol-generating medical procedures to guidelines on how to best communicate between resuscitation and support teams. You wonder how your department can implement multiple changes …