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Practice for sale formQuality improvement (QI) activities improve clinical care and patient outcomes in general practice. The RACGP defines continuous quality improvement as an ongoing activity undertaken within a general practice with the primary purpose of monitoring, evaluating or improving the quality of healthcare delivered to practice patients.
What are QI toolkits?
Due to the complexity and time constraints in primary healthcare settings, completing QI activities can be a daunting task for healthcare providers. QI toolkits are structured sets of tools, methods and resources designed to help organisations in improving health outcomes, such as increasing the rates of early diagnosis or optimising treatment pathways.
South Western Sydney PHN (SWSPHN) has created a range of QI toolkits tailored to assist your practice in identifying and planning data-driven QI activities, on selected clinical topics. The toolkits are designed to make implementing measurable and sustainable improvements easier and will help your practice complete QI activities using the Model for Improvement (MFI).
Who can use the toolkits? How do they benefit your practice?
Practices participating in the Quality Improvement in Primary Care program (QIPC) or anyone interested in knowing more about QI in the general practice setting can utilise the QI toolkits. The activities in the toolkits can assist in maintaining continuing professional development (CPD) requirements, and help your practice meet the requirements for the Practice Incentive Program Quality Improvement (PIP QI).
How to use the toolkits?
The QI toolkits provide guidance with various QI ideas, walkthroughs and resources to assist your continuous QI activities on different topics e.g. heart health and hepatitis C. Each QI toolkit is presented in a similar format for easy navigation, including:
- Foundation of Quality Improvement
- Quality Improvement Activities
- Tips and Tricks
- Helpful Resources
Practices can use any resources from the above sections of the QI toolkits which best meet your needs and adapt them for your purposes.
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Foundation of Quality Improvement
This section is the same for all the QI toolkits and can be accessed to find out more information on the foundations of QI. It has an easy-to-follow walkthrough on how to complete the MFI to keep track of your QI activities progress, and also an MFI template to utilise for your selected focus areas.
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Quality Improvement Activities
In the QI activities section of each toolkit, you will find categories such as:
- Data Cleansing – Update and improve your patient’s medical records.
- MBS – Increase revenue for your practice by billing the associated item numbers.
- Pathology – Maintain patient pathology records.
- Screening – Identify patients who may benefit from certain types of screening.
- Management – Treatment options and management of certain health conditions.
This area of the QI toolkits may differ depending upon the toolkit topic, however, under each of these categories you will find suggested focus areas for improvement. Every suggested focus area will have tools to enable your practice to achieve improvement in this area. These tools include:
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- Sample MFI – An example of how to record the progress of your selected focus area.
- POLAR Walkthrough – This is a guide to assist you in extracting lists of patient cohorts for the selected focus area.
- Clinical Software Guides (Best Practice and Medical Director ONLY) – These are step-by-step guides to show you how and where to document to ensure patient records for your practice are maintained.
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Tips and Tricks
This area of the toolkit contains helpful hints such as:
- Private bookmark – How to create a private bookmark in POLAR to save a search for a selected patient cohort.
- Data mapping – This shows where and how POLAR picks up the data from within your clinical software and enables you to ensure you are documenting in the correct location, therefore no important data is missed.
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Helpful Resources
Each toolkit has a selection of helpful resources for the selected toolkit topic. These resources have different headings for ease of use, some of the headings include:
- Clinical resources – These are resources which provide information for clinicians.
- Patient resources – These are resources directed at patients.
- CPD/Webinar – These resources can contribute to your CPD requirements and are specific to the toolkit topics.
Assistance and resources
We are continuing to develop new QI toolkit topics, and you can see our latest additions here on the Quality Improvement Toolkits page on the SWSPHN website.
For any enquiries or further information on the QI toolkits please email CQIsupport@swsphn.com.au