Quality Improvement Issue - Term Paper Example

Clinic wait times Clinic wait times One of the major issue in my organization that need to be redesigned for quality improvement is clinic wait times. Yeboah and Thomas (2009) define clinic waiting times as the "clock time from scheduled appointment time to consultation time on the day of an outpatient visit" (para. 8). According to the institute of medicine (2001), the six aims of improvement include safety, effectiveness, patient-centeredness, timely care, efficiency, and equitability. In this regard, prolonged waiting times in my organization means that care is not provided in a timely, effective, and efficient manner.

In my organization, appointments are sometimes not planned by nurses in the outpatients department and as a result, patients complain on a daily basis. Prolonged waiting times have also increased patient dissatisfaction and many of them are increasingly opting to seek the services of our competitors whose waiting times are lower. A study cited by Yeboah and Thomas (2009) showed that increasing waiting times for more than thirty minutes conversely increases patients intolerability. Deliberate lack of scheduling appointments by nurses is contributed by heavy workloads that makes the them forget to schedule appointments.

Strategies to reduce patient waiting times in my organization needs to be redesigned in order to improve quality of care provided. Most importantly, newly formulated strategies ought to focus on reducing nurses workload s. Ho (2014) reiterates that patient waiting time is contributed by increasing patient loads. In fact, there is a lot of confusion among patients when they have multiple appointments. Some of them spend nearly a day as they wait to be attended to. To reduce the patients waiting time in my organization, there is need for decisive and patient centered planning, restructuring, simplifying, and updating workflows in order to improve efficiency of care provided.

ReferencesHo, E. T. (2014). Improving waiting time and operational clinic flow in a tertiary diabetes center. BJM Quality Improvement Reports 2(2), 1-5. Institute of Medicine. (2001). Crossing the quality chasm: A new health system for the 21st century. Retrieved from http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Report%20Files/2001/Crossing-the-Quality- Chasm/Quality%20Chasm%202001%20%20report%20brief.pdf Yeboah, E., & Thomas, M. (2009). A cost effective way of reducing outpatient clinic waiting times: How we did it.

The Internet Journal of Healthcare Administration, 7(1), A4.