An introduction to quality improvement

The concept of quality has moved to the top of the international healthcare agenda in the past 30 years. This has been driven by a growing awareness of the scale of variation in patient outcomes, influenced by both the paucity of and consistency in implementation of evidence-based actions or interventions performed during the delivery of patient care. Concurrently there has been growing interest on the part of healthcare professionals to use a wider range of knowledge and available techniques, from outside of medicine, to continuously improve standards of safe and effective patient care. This is the first in a series of three articles introducing Quality Improvement (QI) methodology and supporting concepts to multidisciplinary teams working in Urology departments in the United Kingdom. We start, in this article, by providing an overview of key QI principles and their industrial roots; we position QI in the context of other approaches to improvement, such as audit, and we outline the key organisations and infrastructure supporting QI work on the ground.