What examples can you provide of a QI project?

Example 1 – Documentation
After a review of charts, we found that our staff is inconsistent in completing discharge summaries in our electronic health care records. We need to have 100% of charts complete and currently only 70% of charts have discharge summaries completed.

Our plan is to initiate a staff education program. After four weeks, we’ll do a chart review and assess how many charts have completed discharge summaries.

Example 2 – Infection Control (see optional Hand Hygiene QI project coming in 2022)

According to the CDC and WHO, hand hygiene is an important practice to reduce the spread of infection. After conducting a brief patient survey, we found that staff’s compliance with appropriate hand hygiene occurred only 50% of the time. Our goal is to increase hand hygiene compliance to 100%.

Our plan is to educate staff and place poster reminders in common places to help AT remember to wash their hands. After two weeks, we’ll conduct another patient survey to assess hand hygiene compliance.

Example 3 – Facilities (see optional Facilities Principles QI project coming in 2022)
Upon review of the BOC Facility Principles and completing the corresponding online Facilities Principles Assessment, we found that our facility only met 40 of the 57 requirements.

We identified three requirements that we could address in the short-term and more in the long-term with the help of appropriate personnel. Following are the three short-term requirements we will address first:

Properly display Material Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) within our facility
Post egress and exit routes in the facility
Display current state licenses and certification of all employees within the facility
At the end of the year, we’ll complete the online Facilities Principles Assessment again to measure the number of requirements our facility now meets, as a comparison.