What is CQI?

Continuous quality improvement (CQI) is growing as a tool to help manage the chaos and massive changes in healthcare today.

So much so, it has emerged as a new paradigm in EMS. Although there are many names and interpretations to the CQI philosophy, Carol Schepper, Organizational Psychologist and CQI Consultant, TQM PLUS defines CQI as "a management philosophy that seeks to put an organization into a state of continual learning and improvement in order to meet and exceed the needs of it’s customers, both now, and in the future." Carol also identifies eight basic concepts of CQI, as illustrated below:

• An organization-wide focus on learning and managing change
• A long-term focus on continuous improvement
• A prevention versus detection approach
• A focus on process AND results versus a results only approach
• A customer-supplier orientation
• Systemic and synergistic thinking
• Statistical and scientific thinking
• Management commitment.

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