Innovative Ways to Engage Frontline Staff: Quality Improvement Analyst Program

Purpose:
The QIA program is designed to engage staff into process improvement activities. The program provides staff with foundation to equip them with tools to: increase knowledge of quality improvement, serve as a unit patient safety champion, disseminate best practices, and lead an improvement project.

Significance:
Before September 2011, high performers were asked to capture action plan criteria from regulatory visits. The data was variable across units. The results were shared within the unit. With the addition of a nursing quality manager, priority was to provide structure to the work and broaden impact.

Strategy and Implementation:
The QIA program kicked off in September 2011 with a one and a half day training for eight nurses. The QIA's were charged with high expectation of serving as the quality and patient safety champions on their unit, increasing knowledge of quality improvement at the frontline, staff performance around various quality initiatives, leading a quality improvement project along with presenting and spreading their best practices to other areas. Through monthly group meetings, collaboration and sharing of best practices is facilitated. Half of the monthly meeting is focused on professional growth through “lunch and learns”. Various topics have been presented including Infection Control Prevention, focused Microsoft Excel teaching, training for difficult conversations, rounding for outcomes, and much more. Through this training the QIA's lead projects and gather data on both their projects and other key quality goals of the hospital.

Evaluation:
Before the QIA program, 168 hours per week were used for data collection on 70% of the nursing units. After the QIA program, the work was streamlined to 120 hours per week with focus on projects; covering 100% of the units. This is an annualized savings of 2,496 hours.

Implications for Practice:
One of the challenges in nursing is to engage the bedside caregiver in practice changes. With the QIA program, nurses are able to have one out of staffing shift to dedicate to working on quality improvement work.