If you have an exact title add ti= (eg. ti=Emergency Medicine)
The Monash Health Quality & Safety Unit offers a number of templates and tools to support quality improvement projects, including a comprehensive Improvement Workbook which you can download and fill out. The Improvement Workbook also contains links to further reading for each stage of the process.
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Monash Health templates & tools
Quality & Safety Unit intranet page
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) offers additional tools, including tools for patient safety and improving maternal outcomes.
IHI Quality Improvement Essentials Toolkit
The NSW Health Clinical Excellence Commission (CEC) has made the following tools available via its website:
Clinical Excellence Commission templates
The CEC also has a clear and succinct step-by-step guide available as a PDF.
Developing aim statements
What are you trying to accomplish? The aims of your project should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based (SMART goals). The Quality & Safety Unit's Improvement Workbook includes a worksheet to assist you in developing your aim statement. Below are examples from the IHI.
| Overarching aim | Example aim statement |
| Patient safety |
Achieve > 95 percent compliance with on-time prophylactic antibiotic administration within 1 year. |
| Clinic access |
Reduce waiting time to see a urologist by 50 percent within 9 months. |
| Flow |
Transfer every patient from the inpatient facility to a long-term care facility within 24 hours after the patient is deemed ready to transfer. |
| Critical care |
Reduce incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia by 25 percent. |
Adapted from: IHI. (n.d.). Science of improvement: Setting aims. https://www.ihi.org/resources/Pages/HowtoImprove/ScienceofImprovementSettingAims.aspx
A good first step to any improvement project (4 mins)
If you are visiting this guide, chances are that you already have an improvement idea in mind. If not, Dr Don Goldmann, Chief Medical and Scientific Officer at the IHI, explains a good first step -- looking at "what ticks you off".
Further reading
Developing a measurement strategy
A successful measurement strategy combines multiple measures from each of these categories:
Scroll down to the Further Reading section for more information and examples of each of the above measures.
How do I measure my improvements work? (7 mins)
This video from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) uses clinical examples to explain outcome measures, process measures, and balancing measures. See also the two IHI resources in 'Further reading' above.
Mike Davidge on measurement for improvement (10 mins)
Mike Davidge, Head of Measurement at the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, explains the seven steps to measurement for improvement.
Further reading
Is it quality improvement (QI), research, or something else?
Before planning a QI project, take a moment to confirm that your initial ideas align with the QI process.
The figure below by Backhouse (2020) explains the differences and similarities between QI, original research, clinical audit, and related projects.
Image: Backhouse, A. (2020). Quality improvement into practice. BMJ, 368. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m865
Click the image to view it full-size.
Further reading
What's the difference between research and QI? (2 mins)
In this video from the IHI Open School, Dr James Moses -- Medical Director of Quality Improvement at Boston Medical Center -- discusses the difference between a research project and a quality improvement project.
You may need to submit a Quality Assurance Application to register your QI project with Research Support Services (RSS) at Monash Health. The RSS team then determines whether or not your project is exempt from Human Research Ethics review.
For more information, visit the links below.
RSS website - Quality Assurance and Negligible Risk Projects
Prompt - Quality Assurance/Negligible Risk Research Policy & Procedure
The RSS team also provides recordings of their Ethics and Governance Seminar Series. Session 1 of the series discusses Quality Assurance/QI projects.
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