LONG TERM CARE QUALITY ASSURANCE

Tools and Practices in Long Term Care Quality Assurance

Tools and Practices in Long Term Care Quality Assurance

Prior to the late 20th century, "long-term care", mainly focused on people or patients of older age, this institution for a long time health care, personal care and rehabilitation services, of fered support and rehabilitation to patients suffering from old age problems. Quality management standards to admit long-term care installation to reply to environmentally and manufacture changes, while enhancing the customer's response. This change in response is a key factor in the success of any facility. (Powell, 2003)

The so-called "total quality management" (TQM) within the scope of the representative organizations of improving the quality of all employees in all departments and process management and quality management. The two continuous quality improvement and total quality management focus is to provide a service organization meeting the needs and requirements of customers, the services they provide to please, and predict future needs. Because long-term care facilities to specify different quality management processes of total quality management or extensive CQI, we believe that there is a specific need - combining quality management or Dawei - a combination of philosophy and their basis. (Powell, 2003)

PDCA Cycle

PDCA cycle, also popularly known as Shewhart cycle is a problem solving process of four stages developed by Walter Shewhart, in the early 1900's, in the Bell Laboratories, U.S. In the 1950's quality management Guru W. Edward Deming further popularized it and hence the process is also called the Deming Cycle or the Deming Wheel. It was Deming who coined the term Shewhart cycle after his teacher Walter Shewhart. However, Deming suggested that Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) felt more appropriate than Plan-Do-Check-Act, as 'Study' fit the intent of the process better than 'Check'.

Shewhart originally conceptualized this statistical process control for improvement of manufacturing processes. However, today it has been widely adopted as an effective process improvement tool in organizations. PDCA states that improvement programs should be initiated with systematic planning, which bring about effective results; and then again in a continuous cycle should be followed by careful planning.

Each phase of the PDCA cycle is described below:

Plan

Identify a problem - Identify a problem that must be addressed. This can be done using Pareto charts or simply through brainstormingIdentify the causes - Identify the causes of the problem using a Pareto chart, or by other means(Analyze( the causes - Determine the cause and effect relationship ...