NURS 3321 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Quality Assurance, Pdca, Pressure Ulcer
Document Summary
Quality assurance (qa) is a process of meeting industry-set quality standards and assuring that care reaches an acceptable level. Qa is a reactive, retrospective effort to examine why a unit or facility fails to meet certain standards. Qa activities do improve quality, but efforts frequently end once the standard is met. Quality improvement (qi) is a pro-active, continuous study of processes with the intent to prevent or decrease the likelihood of problems by identifying areas of opportunity and testing new approaches to fix underlying causes of persistent/ systemic problems. This is also known as performance improvement (pi). Characteristics of qa / qi projects: uses the words qi or mentions quality improvement or performance improvement as a part of the goals of the article rather than simply describing the activities of research. Examples include, but are not limited to: hourly rounding,
