Quality requirements in nursing departments: development and use of a general framework.

The nursing staff of the Nijmegen University Hospital has implemented a project to formulate and evaluate objectives of quality of care. A quality profile, formulated on a national level, has been used as a guide in quality projects at nursing units for four years. The results of these quality projects show a lot of definite quality improvements and also a large number of quality requirements. In 1991 an inventory was made of these requirements. A specific method was used to select these requirements. Finally, a new framework of quality requirements was formulated. This framework offers the Nijmegen University Hospital possibilities such as: (i) being a source from which targets may be selected for quality improvement projects; (ii) requirements being made operational and used to measure the quality of nursing care.