Clinical Safety and Effectiveness Educational Program
Program Goals
Safety and effectiveness will be integrated into the way we do our work every day.
We must learn to:
- identify
- measure and
- minimize the variation in all our health-care processes to maximize the quality of the health care we deliver
Program Objectives
- To optimize the culture of clinical safety and effectiveness at M. D. Anderson by:
- Demonstrating improvements with projects learned in the CSE Training Program
- Coordinating administrative and medical knowledge through the CSE Training Program
- Developing leaders with a common understanding and future vision of clinical safety and effectiveness
- To develop methods for organizational learning based on:
- Improvement projects
- Quality improvement language and tools
- Convincing, concrete examples to bring others along
Program Description:
The Science of Process Management
Quality Improvement is the science of process management. Health-care delivery is a complex system made up of thousands of interlinked, and therefore interdependent, processes. Since
- all work is a process
- all processes vary
- variation is an indication of waste
…we must learn to
- identify
- measure and
- minimize the variation in all our health-care processes to maximize the quality of the health care we deliver
Waste takes several forms in health care:
- over-treating
- under-treating
- mis-treating
- delays
- close-calls and errors
In Fourth Generation Management (McGraw-Hill, 1994), Brian L. Joiner, a protégé of W. Edwards Deming, discusses in detail various aspects of managing and improving organizations using the process paradigm. In Measuring Quality Improvement in Healthcare (Quality Resources, 1995), Raymond G. Carey and Robert C. Lloyd present a methodology for quantitatively measuring variation and tracking the effects of process changes.