Preparing for the future means investing in quality today

Stephanie Mercado, CAE, CPHQ, serves as CEO of the National Association for Healthcare Quality®, the leader of industry-standard healthcare quality and safety competencies, training, and certification. NAHQ® supports healthcare professionals across the country and internationally.

Mercado brings more than 20 years of healthcare experience, implementing innovative research, competencies and workforce solutions for healthcare professions. Her visionary leadership at NAHQ has advanced quality professionals and increased the impact of the quality workforce.

Too often, the response to financial pressures in healthcare is cutting non-clinical services. What is the likely impact of that?

SM: I worry that budget pressures across the country tempt leaders to make dramatic reductions in non-bedside departments — a dangerous and risky proposition that will no doubt impact the organizational mission of high quality, accessible and equitable care. Leaders who believe the quality function is only about measurement and compliance will miss the opportunity to use quality as a business strategy, creating greater impact and positive, sustainable outcomes.

In addition, pay for performance remains on the short-term horizon — a mandate that only can be met with high- functioning quality and safety teams, and positive outcomes and impact. The time to prepare is now.

My counsel: Retain the quality and safety workforce and use these individuals and teams for improvement and redesign. Challenge them to improve quality, reduce variation in care and remove waste from the system. You trusted your quality teams during the pandemic to carry out such innovations as leading incident command centers, setting up telehealth, creating mass vaccination clinics, building temporary units to house COVID patients and more. Trust them now to use the same methods and know-how to address today’s challenges.

What skills are needed to advance quality and safety?

SM: The dramatic changes and resulting impact of the past three years remind us that we are not going back to past care delivery and systems, but rather redesigning new, integrated approaches across the continuum. New care delivery approaches, such as virtual care delivery, reimbursement models, goals for equity, and advancing science, requires knowledge and skills in understanding, measuring, improving and redesigning care — all tools routinely used by quality professionals. Quality professionals are prepared to guide, test and refine the processes, outcomes and improvements of systems, and to demonstrate impact with data. This is not the time to take one’s foot off the gas of quality and safety. In fact, it is essential to accelerate the efforts.

How can healthcare leaders balance today’s pressures with a commitment to quality for the long-term?

SM: Solving problems superficially without a focus on quality and safety will not help for very long. Eventually that strategy bubble will spring a new leak. Red pens may solve for today, but bigger challenges and opportunities will be experienced tomorrow. Care delivery today must still be safe, timely, equitable, efficient, effective and person-centered. Absent that, financial, workforce and community challenges will only grow.

Commit daily to understanding the quality and safety of care for those you serve. Demonstrate that commitment with your time and visibility.

As a leader, you have to make the hard choices to do what is right for healthcare in the long term — not just what is right today to hit a budget number. Financial challenges in healthcare are real. A long view toward sustainability of high quality, safe outcomes is the only truly effective approach.

We now know that not all quality professionals and quality teams are created equal. Knowledge, skills and abilities, as well as roles and responsibilities, may vary. It is essential to understand the readiness of this valuable quality and safety workforce, and aim to skill-up the contribution of individuals to build more capabilities and positive outcomes for your organization. Count on your quality workforce and make sure to invest in their success with training and skill building.

To learn more visit: nahq.org/workforce-report