Continuous Quality improvement(CQI) in healthcare

  Continuous Quality Improvement in Healthcare Name Institution Affiliation   Continuous Quality Improvement in Healthcare  Introduction Continuous quality improvement (CQI) refers to a strategy used by organizations to minimize wastes and enhance efficiency in a bid to increase the satisfaction of both the employees and clients (Lorch & Pollak, 2014). In other words, it is a process designed to ensure that all stakeholders are satisfied with the operations carried out in a particular organization. There is a misconception that when a problem arises, it is a consequence of unclear instructions, failure of the management team or a poor work design and cannot be attributed to individuals performing the process. However, problems can also stem from individual employees for failure to follow instructions from management or to apply the suitable techniques to perform a certain task (Lorch & Pollak, 2014). The principle behind CQI is that regardless of the utmost care, systems and processes can never be designed to be perfect and the fact that several changes occur every day in the business world. Therefore, it is necessary to adopt an evolutionary process that helps to detect changes and implement the suitable corrective actions (Lorch & Pollak, 2014). In the field of healthcare, CQI has been proven to be an effective strategy in improving care for patients, clients, and residents as well as improving the welfare of the staff (Sollecito & Johnson, 2012).  The healthcare sector has plenty of opportunities to streamline, develop, optimize and test processes and CQI should be an integral part of all individuals irrespective of the position or the role they play within the organization. To even achieve a higher level of effectiveness, any health care system should integrate all of its parts in a bid to offer high-quality care to the patients. For any organization to offer high-quality care, it must possess high-level of safety, should be accessible to all, must be effective, equitability, high efficiency, be appropriately resourced, focused on population and integrated (Sollecito & Johnson, 2012). Quality improvement is largely based on having a clear understanding of the entire system, the complexity of dealing with individuals, different outcomes resulting from the system and application of knowledge to alter some of these outcomes. Generally, quality improvement programs are designed and applied by leaders and local staff who are experts at solving problems and managing group dynamics (Sollecito & Johnson, 2012). However, they involve various stakeholders such as government, patients, community and suppliers in the implementation of these programs. CQI initiatives are made up of various teams that play different roles to achieve a particular objective (National Learning Consortium, 2013). They contain a local interdisciplinary team whose main function is setting different goals for improvement. The second team has a responsibility to identify barriers to quality, sources of the problems or system flaws that hinder the delivery of quality care. The team is mandated with formulating and executing various ideas to improve care delivery and finally the fourth group...