Workshop: Championing Neonatal Therapists’ Development Through Continuous Quality Improvement

Description: Quality improvement and service evaluation are key tenets of neonatal therapy practice in ensuring that we are providing safe, effective and evidence-based services. However, sometimes it can be difficult to know where to start with designing quality improvement projects that truly capture the changes that may respond from service development initiatives.

This half-day pre-conference session will be a workshop providing a foundation in continuous quality improvement (CQI) and will include an opportunity to design a CQI project. Topics covered will include the definition of continuous quality improvement itself as well as CQI methodology and how this can be applied in the NICU setting. The workshop will start with an overview of the rationale and strategies for consideration of published evidence, both in terms of quality as well as applicability to a potential CQI project, in order to develop the background for a project. Differentiation of a CQI project, as compared with a research project, as well as when institutional review board/research ethics approval is needed, will be discussed. A variety of CQI tools will be described and practiced during the workshop, including those available from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, such as Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) cycles, driver diagrams, fishbone diagrams, and run charts.

Attendees will have time and support during this workshop to design a CQI project individually or in small groups as well as in identifying applicable CQI tools and creating the materials for their project. The implementation of this project in the face of a busy clinical schedule will also be discussed as well as strategies for enlisting multidisciplinary support, including NICU families, into CQI projects in the NICU.

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Main Conference registration is more than 50% full.