Continual Quality Improvement

Benefits to the Practice

Change is constant and with the process of continuous documentation & auditing one can identify the areas where the policies and protocols can be amended, needed training imparted and desired result can be achieved.

Your organization will benefit from identifying the areas where it needs improvement and ultimately it will lead to the better patient satisfaction.

This section is intended to guide you with the process of improving the quality of care in the practice.

To improve quality of care of the organization must collect, analyze clinical & non Clinical data related to the services offered to the patients.

Ongoing analysis will give you the correct insight of the success and failures in your organization and will give you a chance to act on and fill the lacunae.

What does it mean?

Implementation of Quality standards encourage an environment of continual quality improvement. The quality and safety program should be documented and involve all the aspects of a dental setup & its staff members.

While we keep learning and growing, there should be re-conciliatory mechanisms because

"THERE IS ALWAYS ROOM FOR IMPROVEMENT".

While you place various systems in your clinic, whether the systems are really working and are policies implemented, there should be a periodic check to evaluate the sustainability of these processes and hence there should be periodic

INTERNAL QUALITY AUDITS.

These audits find the loopholes in your current systems, so you can improve on that and act upon it and improve your quality of care.

Process of periodic auditing of the most important quality indicators that actually affects the out come of any procedure or overall patient care & experience in the Practice will not only improve Quality of care in your practice but your team members will be more responsible & accountable for the care they are offering to the patients.

This chapter deals with various quality audit programs and how to go about it, the exact process of revaluation and how data collection is done and analyzed and used for further improvements.

A multidisciplinary approach is necessary for continual quality improvement and some keys to go around this chapter are:

• Perform periodic audits
• Check if the policies are implemented effectively and are useful for the organization.
• Ask for feedback from the patients & visitors and analyze the feedback.
• Update the policies if needed wherever you find a valid reason for updating the policy.
• Conduct frequent and periodic staff training program.

We as dentists should define & document sentinel events and intensively investigate when such events occur.

It will help us only to build a strong foundation for better and ever improving patient care and experience in the clinic.