What is it about?
Quality improvement is an important part of modern veterinary practice. It is a discipline that helps teams discuss past-mistakes and identify areas for improvement. By framing improvement as a continual process, it helps team members see the value in speaking up with important information, recording accidents and near-misses, and discussing events with an emphasis on learning. Quality improvement is a process that is used in many so-called high-risk industries to mitigate the challenges of complex, cognitively demanding, time-bound work.
Featured Image
Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Quality improvement is an evidence based framework that leads to improved care quality. It emphasizes the importance of communication, team work, and trust in clinical scenarios, and helps us understand accidents of patient care, to avoid repeating the same mistake in the future. By practicing quality improvement in everyday practice we can gradually enhance workplace culture too.
Perspectives
Writing this article has been a particular delight because of the opportunity to discuss the close relationship between QI and culture. Hopefully, by defining QI, patient safety and workplace culture in turn, and making explicit the close associations between all three, veterinary teams will get a new perspective on the importance of talking about accidents, open communication and compassion. It has been an equal pleasure to write alongside Pam Mosedale, who does so much for the profession in these areas too.
Mark Turner
University of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Quality improvement for patient safety and a better practice culture, The Veterinary Nurse, May 2022, Mark Allen Group,
DOI: 10.12968/vetn.2022.13.4.156.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
