Service improvement in health care: a literature review

Abstract

Service improvements in health care can improve provision, make cost savings, streamline services and reduce clinical errors. However, on its own it may not be adequate for improving patient outcomes and quality of care. The complexity of healthcare provision makes service improvement a challenge, and there is little evidence on whether improvement initiatives change healthcare practices and improve care. To understand the concept of service development within health care, it is necessary to explore the national context and how the NHS has adopted improvement initiatives. To equip the nursing workforce with the skills necessary to make positive change, higher education institutions have developed courses that include the topic within their pre-registration programmes. However, service improvement is a learned skill that nurses need to practise in order to become competent.

Partnering with healthcare organisations to teach pre‐registration health professions students about quality improvement: A systematic review

“…There have been several systematic reviews investigating the teaching of quality improvement to pre‐registration health professions students (Armstrong et al, 2017; Starr et al, 2014), medical students (Boonyasai et al, 2007; Gordon et al, 2012; Kirkman et al, 2015; Peiris‐John et al, 2020; Wong et al, 2010) and nursing students (Craig, 2018). An important finding was that students are most engaged when quality improvement learning is experiential and they tackle real‐world problems in collaboration with healthcare organisations (Armstrong et al, 2017; Boonyasai et al, 2007; Peiris‐John et al, 2020).…”

Deep-learning system to improve the quality and efficiency of volumetric heart segmentation for breast cancer

“…Medical knowledge is increasing exponentially with an estimated doubling every few months as of 2020 1 . While this has improved healthcare across the world 2 , it is paralleled by increasingly specialized expert knowledge, which may be disproportionately distributed to high-resource medical centers, thus increasing healthcare disparities 3 . Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI), and deep learning in particular, offer a novel way to improve and automate complex tasks that up until now could only be performed by professionals 4 .…”

Importance of Quality of Medical Record: Differences in Patient Safety Incident Inquiry Results According to Assessment for Quality of Medical Record

“…In addition, because no related studies have been published in the last decade, and the healthcare system has undergone many changes over that time, including digitization, improvements to health services and equipment, and advancements in electronic medical records, further studies are necessary. [17][18][19][20] Against this backdrop, we analyzed whether there were differences in the characteristics of screening criteria and adverse events according to the quality of medical records assessed in the patient safety incident investigation (PSII), conducted to identify the status of patient safety at the national level in Korea. The results of this study will be meaningful in that they verify the prerequisites for the validity of the medical record review methodology commonly used to identify adverse events.…”

“…However, caution should be exercised when generalizing these results to other countries because the study was conducted in a specific country and potential cultural differences may exist in healthcare environments. In addition, because no related studies have been published in the last decade, and the healthcare system has undergone many changes over that time, including digitization, improvements to health services and equipment, and advancements in electronic medical records, further studies are necessary 17–20 …”