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 …
How to Read and Make Statistical Process Charts – Part 1
You are attending your monthly ED business meeting. There has been a recent effort to decrease the time it takes a patient to be transferred to the imaging department for a STAT CT scan. The project team has concluded the first two PDSA cycles after wide stakeholder engagement, and a root cause analysis. Two interventions were carried out: one, redesigning the process for patient pick up and transport, and two, a new expedited …
Electronic Health Record Systems and the Emergency Department Part 1 – Introduction
You are working on a busy overnight shift in your local emergency department. You are comfortable with your flow, but feel that you are subject to some inefficiencies including finding the next patient’s chart, and different paper order sets, and having to write out lengthy discussions that you had with patients. You are often forced to put on your detective hat as you try to decipher previous handwritten notes in your patient’s chart. …
HiQuiPs: Quality Improvement in the time of COVID-19
You are attending your monthly ED staff meeting where the main topic of discussion is the COVID-19 pandemic. Recent events around the world have compelled your hospital to make changes to better prepare for the expected increase in local respiratory cases. The ED staff meeting has a debrief about some changes that will be happening including personal protective equipment use changes, new COVID-19 swab testing, ED triage and flow changes and many other …
Special HiQuiPs Post: Ontario ED Return Visit Quality Program Part 3 – Program Accomplishments
You are working a busy shift in your busy emergency department (ED), when you are called by the microbiologist about a positive blood culture gram stain on a patient discharged home. You call the patient’s caregiver and they relay that the patient is doing well. You believe that the culture may be a contaminant from skin flora, but ask the patient and their caregiver to return to the ED for reassessment, possible admission …