Sustaining QI Training in a State Health Department

With Public Health Accreditation, establishing Quality Improvement (QI) methods to be more efficient and effective has become a national trend among health departments.  Public health agencies preparing for Accreditation across the nation are training staff and launching agency-wide initiatives to use the QI tools that would save time, money and better serve our customers. 

One state health department developed a three-year cycle strategy to sustain QI training for its staff. In the first year a team receives initial expert training, and then customizes training content, examples and lessons learned for the following teams.  Using this low-cost strategy, the state health department has provided meaningful QI training to over 10% of its workforce and is launching a “QI 101” basic training program to all staff. Beyond the benefits of the QI improvements from conducting about a dozen QI projects each year, the agency is developing real QI capacity among its staff, realizing savings in training costs, maintaining the interest in QI and making progress leading to an agency-wide culture of Quality Improvement.

This presentation will discuss:

-         the low cost, 3-year cycle sustainable methodology for QI training

-         the estimated cost of the in-house training

-         the evaluation results of each training session and the agency’s plans to sustain QI training

The ultimate benefit of Public Health Accreditation is not reaching the certification status, but instituting a culture of quality improvement that is sustainable and becomes part of the fabric of the daily work. When government resources especially for training are scarcer than ever, developing our workforce and achieving efficiencies across the board must be considered a priority to make real progress in the public health goals.