Quality Circles and Feedback Loops

In Health Care

In health care there are three main areas of concern when it comes to total quality management and continuous quality improvement which are job satisfaction, safety issues (infection control/sanitation), and medical errors making the delivery of care a crucial and necessary quality for any health care facility.   Quality circles and feedback loops are used in businesses to determine the progress and success of an organization.  They also allow employers, employees, and customers/patients to measure the satisfaction of quality of care or performance and cut costs by resolving issues of waste.  A quality circle is defined as a group of people who do the same or similar work in the same or work-related field.  The group is usually small in size and is led by someone in management, considers and improves upon solutions or performances presented by the

workers or employees.  Feedback loops are sometimes called complaint loops, but are mostly used for to determine cause-and-effect.

In the health care system in organizations such as the Veterans Administration where thousands of military and former military men, woman, and children are seen for health care needs on a daily basis and just like any other organization the VA is met with concerns and problems related to quality care.  Continuous quality improvement (CQI) in health care involve mountains of data and the process involved in acquiring the information as shown below:

DATA-TO-DECISION CYCLE

Health information technology (HIT) is so important for patient and medical staff, the collecting process and input of data into medical records can determine a positive or negative outcome.  What is entered into the record must be accurate, necessary, meaningful, and error free, especially when it comes to medication information (Sollecito & Johnson, 2013, Pp. 338-339).  Medication errors have become a problem over the years, they cab be extremely costly.  To make this process cost effective there needs to be a certain amount of knowledge and education involved with the delivery of improving the quality of issues related to the medication error process.   Decisions lead to action or inaction, this result is feedback.  Feedback is motivation for improvement and takes knowledge and collaboration of shared goals for a quality improvement team to use data information to improve on a specific medication delivery system to rectify the onset of medication errors (Sollecito & Johnson, 2013, p 340).  Of course, this all depends on the data collected and the availability of the data. 

FEEDBACK LOOP

Below are listed charts and processes in which to measure and deliver methods of analyzing the success of the key elements of TQM and CQI when quality circle and feedback loops are used in the health care industry.

·      Checklist

·      Pareto Charts

·      Control Charts

·      Histograms

·      Cause & Effect

·      Process Mapping

In conclusion, both quality circles and feedback loops have been effective in

providing solutions in work-related problems and are necessary to complete the

PDSA cycle.  Essentially, there are negative and positive feedback in any organization and the only 

way for improvement is to continually making the changes needed by taking the action related to the 

issue be it job satisfaction, safety issues related to infection control, or medical errors.  The one all 

have in common is cost which is pasted on to the customer.patient and at more times than not 

interferes with the quality of care received.

                                                            

                                                             Reference

Sollecito, W. A. & Johnson, J. K.  (2013) Mclaughlin and Kaluzny’s continuous quality

            improvement in health care. Jones & Bartlett Learning