The healthcare improvement workbook was developed to support local teams with quality improvement tools and enable service improvements with existing resources and limited budgets. Two versions of the FFFAP healthcare improvement workbook have been developed for the National Audit of Inpatients Falls (NAIF) and Fracture Liaison Service Database (FLS-DB).
We all want to do better for our service and for our patients. However, in this era of ever-increasing financial restraints due to COVID-19 and other competing healthcare conditions, we are often in a position where we must improve our service on a budget using whatever resources are available to us at that moment. We hope that this workbook will help to teach you techniques that you can use during your work practice to continually improve over time in spite of the challenges we face today.
The techniques are based on the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) breakthrough collaborative series model, which has achieved dramatic results, including reducing waiting times by 50%, reducing ICU costs by 25%, and reducing hospitalisations for patients with congestive heart failure by 50%; all without substantially increasing resource use. The key to this is becoming more effective and efficient at service delivery by identifying gaps in our service and brainstorming techniques for improvement.