261192 Building and sustaining a culture of quality improvement in local health departments: An interactive session

Tuesday, October 30, 2012 : 8:30 AM - 10:00 AM

Pooja Verma, MPH , Accreditation Preparation and Quality Improvement, National Association of County and City and Health Officials, Washington, DC
John W. Moran, PhD, MBA, MS, CQM , Senior Quality Advisor, Public Health Foundation; Senior Fellow, University of Minnesota School of Public Health, None, Eliot, ME
The public health field is a dynamic, continually changing environment with new health issues emerging every day. In recent years, QI has been introduced to and embraced by the field of public health as a means to achieve efficiencies and improve quality of services during a time of tough economic and political pressures. According to the National Association of County and City Health Official's 2010 National Profile of Local Health Departments, sixty-nine percent of LHDs reported implementation of QI activity either on an informal or ad hoc basis or a formal basis in specific areas of the agency. Though this is a tremendous milestone in the advancement of QI in the field, only 15% of LHDs reported having a formal, agency-wide QI program. Beyond discrete process improvements, achieving and sustaining an integrated agency-wide culture of QI is necessary to achieve efficiencies, demonstrate return on investment, and ultimately impact health outcomes. Once LHDs have taken the initial steps of learning about and implementing successful QI efforts, it is important to anchor this progress, sustain a culture of QI, and not revert back to the old status quo. In this interactive session, participants will discuss what it means to have a culture of QI and offered strategies to cultivate and sustain this culture. Participants will also engage in an interactive activity to assess where their agency is with respect to cultivating a QI culture, how to grow and sustain their QI culture, and identify challenges they will have along this journey. Participants interested in using QI in their agencies but are unsure of how to build upon and sustain the early stages of a QI culture will walk away from this session with an understanding of how to overcome barriers, maintain progress, manage change, and continuously sustain improvements.

Learning Areas:
Administration, management, leadership
Public health or related organizational policy, standards, or other guidelines

Learning Objectives:
1.Define a culture of quality improvement 2.Assess progress towards cultivating a culture of quality improvement 3.Discuss barriers and challenges to cultivating a culture of quality improvement 4.Identify strategies to build and sustain a culture of quality improvement

Keywords: Quality Improvement, Accreditation

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Qualified on the content I am responsible for because: I have over 30 years of quality improvement(QI)expertise in developing QI tools and training programs, implementing and evaluating QI programs, and writing articles and books on QI methods. I have authored numerous articles, case studies, and textbooks in Public Health, Health Care, Quality Function Deployment, and Process Redesign. I am ASQ Certified Quality Manager (CQM), a Certified Quality Improvement Associate (CQIA) and a Certified Management Consultant (CMC) by the Institute of Management Consultants.
Any relevant financial relationships? No

I agree to comply with the American Public Health Association Conflict of Interest and Commercial Support Guidelines, and to disclose to the participants any off-label or experimental uses of a commercial product or service discussed in my presentation.