Table 1 Continuous Quality Improvement – Attributes and Potential Associated Activities—adapted from Juran’s Quality Handbook [6]
From: Continuous quality improvement in nephrology: a systematic review
Attributes of continuous quality improvement | Example(s) of associated activities |
|---|---|
Highly team based and multi-disciplinary | Bringing together staff from management, administration, and ‘front-lines’ to meet for improvement goal |
Understanding a process-either to identify areas of improvement or better understand how things get done | Process mapping |
Flow diagrams | |
Assessing current capabilities of process or system | Control charts |
Statistical process control | |
Generation and arranging of theories for why problems exist | Tabulation methods |
Cause/effect (Ishikawa) diagrams | |
Process dissection, a way of testing why a process that is ‘capable’ isn’t performing right | Testing at Intermediate stages |
Stream-to-stream testing | |
Time-to-time analyses | |
Choosing best solutions for process improvement or product design | Rank ordering attributes in terms of importance |
Quality Function Deployment | |
Understanding current state/processes | Process mapping |
Flow diagrams | |
A3’s | |
Instituting remedies | Plan, do, check, act |