Understanding Improvement: Essential Skills for Quality and Safety (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: So why does everybody need to understand the basics of improvement? Well, essentially, we don't really know the answers to our biggest complex quality and safety issues today. And we need to really make sure that we involve everybody in helping us discover solutions to these problems. So everybody needs, in their day-to-day practice, a way to solve challenges and fix things without needing to ask permission. And the tools of improvement give you a way to do that.

Speaker 2: Seeing things through an improvement lens can help you to, instead of continuing to do those workarounds and create additional steps and additional waste, really think about, how can I do this differently? What ideas can I try today to make this better for my own work?

Speaker 1: Improvement is a skill. It needs practice and refinement over time. It's all the softer stuff around improvement. So how do you influence and engage people? How do you really do this work in practice in the midst of a really busy environment, where you're functioning on a day-to-day, a minute-to-minute basis, and yet thinking about how do you improve things for tomorrow? That's a skill, and that needs lots and lots of practice to hone and refine.

Speaker 2: We're all experts in a certain content area. You might be a nurse or a doctor or a data technician, whatever it is. You have that content knowledge expertise. I think for everyone, it's important to know a little bit of the science of improvement and incorporating that into your daily work, because it can show up in the ways that you look at your data, the way that you think about data, the way that you see the process from a different perspective, like appreciating the system you're working in and thinking about how patients are moving through that system or whoever the customers are. We can bring that into our daily work and thinking about our own workflows and policies and patient engagement on a different level by having that desire to learn and improve in our everyday.