Using quality improvement to enhance mental healthcare
Intended for healthcare professionals
CPD    

Using quality improvement to enhance mental healthcare

Sarah Galloway Quality improvement and innovation project manager and improvement advisor, South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust, London, England
Justin Earl Associate medical director for quality improvement and innovation, South West London and St George’s Mental Health NHS Trust, London, England

Why you should read this article:
  • To increase your understanding of the methods, tools and techniques used in quality improvement

  • To inspire you to use a quality improvement approach to enhance the care of mental health service users

  • To contribute towards revalidation as part of your 35 hours of CPD (UK readers)

  • To contribute towards your professional development and local registration renewal requirements (non-UK readers)

Enhancing the quality of care in healthcare organisations is a constant requirement. Quality is not a static concept and requires continual improvement activities and staff equipped with the skills to undertake the necessary changes. Quality improvement is a systematic approach to enhancing patient care and outcomes that uses iterative tests of change and continuous measurement.

This article explains the methods, tools and techniques used in quality improvement and explores its link to other approaches to improving quality, such as audit, research and service evaluation. The article also details a case study demonstrating how nurses on an inpatient mental health ward used quality improvement to address the low completion rate of weekly named-nurse key work sessions.

Mental Health Practice. doi: 10.7748/mhp.2022.e1618

Peer review

This article has been subject to external double-blind peer review and checked for plagiarism using automated software

@SWLSTG_Qii

Correspondence

Sarah.Galloway@swlstg.nhs.uk

Conflict of interest

None declared

Galloway S, Earl J (2022) Using quality improvement to enhance mental healthcare. Mental Health Practice. doi: 10.7748/mhp.2022.e1618

Published online: 05 July 2022

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