Section 5
Supporting Continuous Quality Improvement and Evidence-Based Public Health Practice
What are Evaluation Tools?
Concepts of continuous quality improvement (CQI) are familiar to administrators but may not be as familiar to practitioners. CQI tools are used to identify, understand, and revise modifiable elements of projects involving multiple sectors, parties, and disciplines, and are ideally suited for use by teams. CQI is sometimes used synonymously with other terms such as total quality management (TQM), total quality care, quality management, and quality improvement (QI). CQI is an ongoing, project-wide framework that team members are committed to. They are involved in monitoring and evaluating the project’s activities and outcomes/outputs to continuously improve them.
The overall goal of CQI is to provide the best service all of the time.
The essential elements of CQI are:
- Customer-mindedness
- Systems orientation (understanding the process and steps)
- Experimentation to test implementation
- Teamwork to broaden vision and solutions
CQI is a philosophy as much as it is a method for improving and maintaining the quality of a process. It combines professional knowledge with improvement knowledge. CQI breaks down the process into a manageable series of steps and then analyzes those steps. To decide what is not working as well as it could be and what might work better, data collection is required. Data allows us to look at variation in any process and make informed decisions.
There are a series of CQI steps that are helpful to improve a project:
- Identify areas for improvement
- Organize a team (get input from others)
- Understand variation in the project and activities (possible areas for improvement)
- Select strategies for improvement