Answer the following questions in your own words about the QI project in one paragraph for each question. 1) What is the name of the organization? 2) What problem was the organization trying to solve or what business process was it trying to improve? 3) What QI tool(s) did the organization use to analyze their problem or business process? 4) What were the results of the changes they implemented in their QI project using these QI tools?
Utilizing Quality Improvement Methods to Address Low Birth Weight Births in Pierce County
Summary
The Pierce County low birth weight (LBW) rate for singletons was worse than the Washington State rate. We elected to work on improving our internal process for providing Maternity Support Services (MSS) to Medicaid eligible women in our county. MSS includes public health nursing home visits for prenatal/postpartum education and referrals. Our theory for improvement was: If we engage MSS-eligible women early (first trimester) in pregnancy for health promotion education and referral for behaviors and conditions associated with LBW, such as smoking, drug-use, poor nutrition, and lack of medical and dental care, then we can impact positive birth outcomes. Our aim for this project was to increase by 20% the number of referrals who received a Public Health Nurse (PHN) office or home visit within 20 working days from referral (baseline 60%).
Quality improvement (QI) tools utilized for this project included root-cause analysis (fishbone diagram) and also line and Pareto charts. We developed a standardized referral process, a nursing practice standard that all referred clients would be contacted within 10 working days of referral, and created new data collection fields in our existing database to better track trends in contact, referrals, and care. Review of the data became part of weekly staff meetings. Targets were established, and at the sixth and final quarterly review for this project, we exceeded both targets for contact within 10 days and home visit within 20 days of referral. Mean gestation at time of first home visit went from 23.2 weeks to 21.6 weeks, failing to reach the target of 13 weeks. Toward the end of the project period, there were changes in the MSS program, and the project team (Black Infant Health; BIH) refocused to a targeted population. The aim for this project was to increase African American (AA) enrollment in MSS by 10%.
Pfeifer, S. Public Health Quality Improvement Exchange. Utilizing Quality Improvement Methods to Address Low Birth Weight Births in Pierce County. Mon, 12/11/2017 - 14:06. Available at http://www.phqix.org/content/utilizing-quality-improvement-methods-address-low-birth-weight-births-pierce-county. Accessed February 28, 2023.
Answer the following questions in your own words about the QI project in one paragraph for each question.
1) What is the name of the organization?
2) What problem was the organization trying to solve or what business process was it trying to improve?
3) What QI tool(s) did the organization use to analyze their problem or business process?
4) What were the results of the changes they implemented in their QI project using these QI tools?
Step by step
Solved in 5 steps
