The Dangers Of Quality Improvement Overload: Insights From The Field

Abstract

Editor's note: This post is also co-authored by Ksenia O Gorbenko, Catherine van de Ruit, and Charles Bosk of the University of Pennsylvania. Quality improvement (QI) and patient safety initiatives are created with the laudable goal of saving lives and reducing “preventable harms” to patients. As the number of QI interventions continues to rise, and as hospitals become increasingly subject to financial pressures and penalties for hospital-acquired conditions (HACs), we believe it is important to consider the impact of the pressure to improve everything at once on hospitals and their staff. We argue that a strategy that capitalizes on “small wins” is most effective. This approach allows for the creation of steady momentum by first convincing workers they can improve, and then picking some easily obtainable objectives to provide evidence of improvement. National Quality Improvement Initiatives Our qualitative team is participating in two large ongoing national quality improvement initiatives, funded by the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Each initiative targets a single HAC and its reduction in participating hospitals. We have visited hospital sites across six states in order to understand why QI initiatives achieve their goals in some settings but not others. To date, we have conducted over 150 interviews with hospital workers ranging from frontline staff in operating rooms and intensive care units to hospital administrators and executive leadership. In interviews for this ethnographic research, one of our interviewees warned us about unrealistic expectations for change, “you cannot go from imperfect to perfect. It’s a slow process.” While there is much to learn about how to achieve sustainable QI in the environment of patient care, one thing is certain from the growing wisdom of ethnographic studies of QI: buy-in from frontline providers is essential for creating meaningful change. Front-line providers often bristle at expectations from those they believe have little understanding of the demands of their daily work. Requiring health care providers to improve on all mandated measures at once—in an atmosphere of reduced reimbursements and frequent staff shortages—is a goal that risks burnout, discouragement, and apathy - all signs of initiative fatigue.