You’re ready to start a quality improvement (QI) project aimed at improving the effectiveness of the communication surrounding patient prognosis by providers. Your Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles involve retrospective chart reviews, surveys with patients to understand their experiences, and 1:1 key informant interviews with inter-disciplinary staff members in your department. You’ve learned about navigating ethics in quality improvement , and have reached out to your institution’s Research Ethics Board or QI leadership to determine the process …
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 …
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 …
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 …
HiQuiPs: Year in Review
It has already been one year since we launched the HiQuiPs (Health informatics, Quality Improvement, Patient Safety) series on CanadiEM. This year we had fifteen contributors from across the country, and over 15,000 page visits to our series. Over the past year, we have produced thirteen posts over the HiQuiPs interrelated fields: Quality Improvement: On QI, we introduced what is quality of care in the ED, then to guide our readers through the …