The National Association for Healthcare Quality® (NAHQ) is a national leader in advancing the improvement of healthcare quality and safety. Its goal is to improve quality and safety through the single biggest lever available to healthcare leaders: the workforce.
NAHQ’s extensive research has identified eight domains of quality and safety which encompass the work performed by healthcare quality professionals.
As healthcare leaders today move past the pandemic phase of COVID-19, they are faced with the daunting task of getting their quality and safety programs back on track. They must improve quality and safety metrics while optimizing cost and reimbursement models to help them turn around the financial crisis that most face today.
NAHQ’s Healthcare Quality and Safety Workforce Report and work with NAHQ clients via its new Workforce Accelerator® program shows that, with limited exception, the healthcare workforce is focused too narrowly on three domains of quality, at the expense of the others. This is particularly troubling because high performance in all eight domains is the key to leveraging healthcare goals of today and tomorrow.
Leaders aiming to get their quality programs on track should not plan to go back to the programs of the past. The NAHQ Healthcare Quality and Safety Workforce Report confirms that work at the advanced level being performed in quality and safety is focused predominantly on three quality domains: regulatory and accreditation, patient safety, and quality leadership and integration.
The analysis also shows that there is insufficient focus on the remaining five quality domains of population health and care transitions, performance and process improvement, health data analytics, professional engagement, and quality review and accountability.
Improving the quality and safety of healthcare in today’s complex environment requires an action orientation as well as a broader perspective of the knowledge, skills and abilities required to make improvement happen.
Many people working in quality and safety come to the work as a second profession and/or with little formal training in quality and safety. Leaders assigning other leaders and staff to these roles have lacked a way to clearly articulate the work that needs to be done to achieve bold quality and safety goals. It is one thing to set quality goals, and it is another for organizations to prepare individuals and teams to achieve these goals.
The next-level goals in healthcare require organizations and individuals to think differently about quality and how to achieve it. Mental models and organizational constructs built from historical reference points will not suffice in the future. A new day requires a new way to think about quality and workforce readiness.
To achieve next-level goals, healthcare organization decision- makers and industry leaders should address the following:
- Expand and act upon quality in the broadest context, incorporating all eight domains of quality and safety included in NAHQ’s Healthcare Quality Competency Framework. Do not isolate quality functions by department or into clinical and non-clinical silos. Understand that shortcomings in one domain of the competency framework will lead to shortcomings in others.
- Develop a proactive, clear staffing plan that articulates who is responsible for which quality and safety work at what level. Coordinate that work within and across your organization and the continuum of care.
- Create a workforce development program that supports competency and skill development of your quality staff. Engage in their continued professional development and fund it.
- Regulatory, accreditation, and rating organizations should add new structural standards for supporting the quality and safety workforce to guarantee support systems are in place to achieve and sustain quality goals. They should support efforts to make sure relevant agencies and organizations fund needed workforce development and reward healthcare organizations that commit to intentional staffing structures, training, and certifications for quality and safety.
- People working in quality should take responsibility for advancing the domain of professional engagement and build competencies in areas most relevant to achieving career and employer goals.
You can read the full NAHQ Healthcare Quality and Safety Workforce Report in the latest issue of Modern Healthcare, or on NAHQ.org.
