Reference no: EM133786020

Healthcare Quality and Improvement

Assignment Information

Overview
For the purpose of this assignment, imagine that you are the chief quality officer for your healthcare organization. It is a Monday morning, and you have five issues to address (represented by the five scenarios listed below) during your department meeting. At the department meeting, you will identify a problem-solving framework to address three of the scenarios and the internal team needed to examine, investigate, and address each issue. You may select the three scenarios that seem more interesting or urgent to you.

Question 1. The chief compliance officer at your organization has asked you if the small community clinic pharmacy that is a part of the organization is still maintaining uniform implementation of narcotic dispensing and documentation procedures. There have been no issues over the last six months after a quality improvement initiative was implemented, but it still needs to be a top priority for your department.

Question 2. Over the weekend, a piece of a drill bit flew off the drill and landed in the tibial tissue field during surgery. The surgeon closed the repair area without removing the drill bit piece. The patient developed sepsis. You may want to review the focused professional practice evaluation standards from The Joint Commission.

Question 3. The ongoing professional practice evaluation (OPPE) practices set by The Joint Commission for all healthcare providers in a medical practice facility were recently revised. Your organization must determine if they need to make any process changes to meet the updated standards.

Question 4. One of your organization's facilities wants to use a security tag for newborns from time of birth to discharge, but it needs your department's approval before implementing this change.

Question 5. The HCAHPS (Hospital Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems) Survey (also known as the CAHPS® Hospital Survey, or Hospital CAHPS®) for the last quarter indicates patients' dissatisfaction with understanding their hospital bill and lack of knowledge about how to get clarification. HCAHPS is a standardized survey instrument and data collection methodology that has been in use since 2006 to measure patients' perspectives of hospital care.

This assignment will help prepare you for your course project through the selection and application of problem-solving frameworks.

Prompt
For this assignment, you need to select and then apply the most appropriate problem-solving frameworks that will help you to address each issue or scenario. You can choose from these four frameworks: tracers, root cause analyses (RCA), failure mode effect analyses (FMEA), and plan-do-study-act (PDSA). You should consider whether you are dealing with a problem that has already taken place or trying to be proactive in your strategy for maintaining excellence in your healthcare facility. You will need to consider stakeholders, too. These are the healthcare professionals and interprofessional team members who may need to be working with you to address the scenario. These might include nurses, physicians, nurse practitioners, therapists, security staff, environmental personnel, billing staff, community board members, or others that you identify. What expectations will you have of these team members as part of your problem-solving strategy? Will they help or hinder your efforts, and why might this be so? Provide specific evidence from at least two scholarly sources to support your claims.
Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria for three of the five scenarios:

Question 1. Compare proactive and reactive problem-solving frameworks: Compare the value and advantages of proactive and reactive problem-solving frameworks in general (you do not need to discuss any of the scenarios).

Question 2. Choose a problem-solving framework: Choose the problem-solving framework that will be the most helpful in addressing each of your three selected scenarios (you may choose which three scenarios out of the five you want to use, and you may use different frameworks for each scenario).

Question 3. Categorize problem-solving frameworks as proactive or reactive: Explain why the problem-solving framework is proactive or reactive and how this helps in the investigative or review process for your three selected scenarios.

Question 4. Apply problem-solving frameworks: Apply your selected framework to your three selected scenarios by describing what will be done at each stage of the framework.

Question 5. Members of the organization: Examine the members of the organization you will need to participate in each step of the framework for your three selected scenarios.
A. Who are the vital interprofessional participants, and what should their contribution be to the investigative process?
B. How can you maximize the actions and inputs of each of the participants?

Question 6. Justify the selection of problem-solving frameworks: Justify the selection of your problem-solving framework for each of your three selected scenarios.

Question 7. Organizational goal: Identify one organizational goal that you think should be attained for each of your three selected scenarios.

Submit this assignment as a 4-to 5-page paper. You must also include an APA-style title page.