Implementing Quality Standards

The definition of high quality care proposed by Lord Darzi in High Quality Care for All (2008) has now become enshrined in the Health and Social Care Act 2012. To achieve high quality care all 3 elements of patient experience, patient safety and clinical effectiveness must be present.

Quality Improvement (QI) is an organizational approach leading to the quality of patient care and patient services through use of specific guidelines, principles, and methods to ensure quality of care for every patient and health care facility throughout the world. Quality outcomes focus on the principles of quality management. These measurements investigate the quality of care, patient outcomes and consumer needs, through being part of the participant group. This quality improvement discussion will review the foundational frameworks of QI and explanation of each framework in detail. Included in this QI report will be

The Care Quality Commission makes sure that hospitals, care homes, dental and GP surgeries, and all other care services in England provide people with safe, effective, compassionate and high quality care, and they encourage these services to make improvements.

The CNO outlined professional standards for nurses to comply with. The seven that are outlined are accountability, continuing competence, ethics, knowledge, knowledge application, leadership, and relationships. “A standard is an authoritative statement that sets out the legal and professional basis of nursing practice” (College of Nurses of Ontario, 2009, p. 3). Although each standard has different meaning, they all work together in order to provide the best possible patient care.

Take part in courses to learn new skills to incorporate into day to day working.

Managing quality and safety is vital in order to deliver effective healthcare today. Unfortunately, very little is known about the quality of care due to the fact that there are a variety of definitions used for the term quality (Stanhope & Lancaster, 2014). This paper will discuss quality management in this country’s healthcare system, some approaches used for quality improvement, as well as the perspectives of quality healthcare from healthcare professionals and clients.

“A framework through which NHS organisations are accountable for continuously improving the quality of their services and safeguarding high standards of care by creating an environment in which excellence in clinical care will flourish” (NHS Executive, 1998).

Quality Assurance (QA) can be defined as those activities that contribute to designing, mentoring and the improvement of quality healthcare. In defining the quality we need to develop the standards that will be used to measure the effect of the quality of work we are striving towards. The standards does not have to be clinical it can be administrative, good standards are usually reliable, realistic clear and valid. With the amount of medical mishaps that we experience on a daily basis it is very important that we have a quality Assurance team in place. In fact an entire

It also proposed new systems to enhance patient care, an emphasis upon health and wellbeing rather than illness and the increased devolution of decision making to local organisations. The need for more partnerships and joint working arrangements between Primary Care Trust’s, Local Authorities, independent and voluntary sector organisations, was also emphasised. A new performance framework was also implemented in April of 2005, Standards for Better Health (Department of Health, 2004) which sets out the level of quality all organisations providing NHS care are expected to meet (core standards) or aspire to (development standards) within UK healthcare. The standards to which the document refers are organised within seven domains ranging from safety and governance, to patient focus and public health and are designed to cover the full range and spectrum of healthcare as enshrined in the Health and Social Care (Community Health and Standards) Act 2003. National Service Frameworks and National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence guidance are integral to this standards based system, whilst The Healthcare Commission has an ongoing and major function to play in the assessment and review of all healthcare organisations.

Quality is the efficiency and effectiveness of what happens, do they monitor and what are their standards (Boex, 2015). The health care

to complete all forms, logs and other records which are called for by your procedures and work instructions in a consistent, timely manner;

It is important to know that perfection in nursing is neither expected nor possible. However excellence in the standard of care for a patient is. Perfection cannot be achieved. Nurses are not machines. At the end of the day nurses can only do what they believe is best for the patient and if failure is an outcome then they cannot be held accountable. The patient signs a consent form with the knowledge that failure can always be expected regarding treatments. However it is the nurse’s duty to respond correctly to failures as a duty of care and carry out a high standard of care hoping for the best possible outcome. Standard of care itself is more defined. It is derived from organizational policies, procedures and those from regulatory bodies. Policies and procedures are in place to define the minimum of staff members. They are merely guidelines and staff members are encouraged to exceed the guidelines set out. It is the staff’s responsibility to follow these guidelines when in practice. Other sources such as documented and mandatory in-services days are also set up to ensure significant knowledge of practice is in place, thus the standard of care is

ISO 9001 is a Quality management standard which is recognised internationally and used by organizations worldwide. It can be used by business of all sizes, it provides an effective quality management system. It was first published in 1987 (updated 1994, 2000, 2008). The latest version was published in 2015. This replaces all the previous editions. (Praxiom Group 2014)

Quality management systems ISO standards is designed to help organizations ensure that they meet the needs of customers and other stakeholders while meeting statutory and regulatory requirements related to a product.

This paper will discuss various aspects of standards research. First, it will select one of the working groups in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) or Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and thoroughly summarize what this group is working on. Next, this paper will justify the need of the IEEE 802 standard used in networking. Also, it will evaluate the three standard organizations including IEEE, ISO, and ANSI to determine the most important for communication technology. Finally, this paper will describe the author’s position on the need for a Federal regulating body of standards such as NIST.