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A Scholarly Approach to Quality Improvement

Faculty, housestaff/fellow, and staff contributions in quality and patient safety are essential to the core mission of UW Medicine. In addition, the promotions process can account for your contributions to quality and safety. Use these pages as a resource as you select a project, define your aims and timelines, identify support, collect data, and disseminate your findings. As healthcare practice evolves, you can play a part in the systematic improvement in the quality of care and patient outcomes. 

QI Match

 is a concept that quickly matches people with projects that fit your specialty, eliminating long and desperate searches. Finding collaborators for your own research projects has never been easier. 

Steps for project support

The Center is happy to provide support and consultation for scholarly projects around quality improvement, patient safety, and value. Please follow these steps:

Step 1: Read

Read through QI Project Toolkit about selecting a project, defining your aims and timelines, identifying support, collecting data, and disseminating your findings.

Step 2: Email

Email Amelia Chappelle at amchappe@uw.edu

 with 1) a description of your potential project including background, objective, results, and summary 2) the type of guidance or assistance that would be helpful. A representative from the Center will reach out to you to schedule a consultation meeting with an expert relevant to your needs.

Identify a project

Ready to apply your QI and patient safety knowledge, but need help identifying a project? Use these resources to connect with ongoing projects or find your own:

Once you have a topic area or project in mind, we can help connect you to a local leader for more guidance and unique expertise. If you would like help making that connection, please email a paragraph description of your project idea to Amelia Chappelle

.

Design for success

Plan your project carefully to best position you for impact, publication, or other dissemination avenues. Design your project using best practices from the literature, and document your methods as the work takes shape. 

Find Funding

You have a project and thoughts about implementation, now you need the resources to complete it. These organizations have a history of funding quality and safety work:

Additionally, external funding may not be necessary to complete your quality improvement project. You can address your hospital or unit's goals and utilize their performance improvement, project management, and data infrastructure. UW Medicine offers funding opportunities, like the UW Medicine Patient Safety Innovations Program.

Get to work

Start your project! Here are some helpful resources.

General Resources

Specific Tools

Share Results

Disseminate your results, make connections and learn more.

Start locally - share lessons learned and best practices from your project with your unit and institution to make an impact and foster a learning culture. Hospital leadership is interested in the results of your project! Share your project at staff meetings, quality and safety meetings, clinical performance meetings, works in progress meetings, and more. For help with dissemination, send a paragraph about your project to Amelia Chappelle

 or contact staff at the UW Medicine Center for Clinical Excellence
uwmc.uwmedicine.org
.

Additionally, you can disseminate your results beyond your institution:

Local Meetings

National Meetings

Quality and Safety Journals

Journals that Publish Quality Improvement Work

Tips for Manuscript Writing

Project Resources

Local Resources

National and International Resources

Publications