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.