Based on the work of the National Council on Research in Child Welfare (NCRCW), this handbook is designed to help agency executives cope with changing times for child welfare agencies, strengthen traditional services to meet today's needs, and analyze and plan for the future. Quality Improvement and Evaluation in Child and Family Services demystifies quality improvement theory and shows, through practical, hands-on tools and exercises, how the process can be used to clarify and improve existing programs and services right now.

Quality Improvement A Guide for Integration in Nursing, Second Edition is an integral resource for both nursing students and professionals. Quality improvement is a crucial part of healthcare and one that nurses are charged with implementing daily as they care for patients.

uality Improvement: A Guide for Integration in Nursing serves as a comprehensive resource for teaching practicing nurses and nursing students about the importance of improving patient care and reducing errors through quality improvement.

This User’s Guide is intended to support the design, implementation, analysis, interpretation, and quality evaluation of registries created to increase understanding of patient outcomes. For the purposes of this guide, a patient registry is an organized system that uses observational study methods to collect uniform data (clinical and other) to evaluate specified outcomes for a population defined by a particular disease, condition, or exposure, and that serves one or more predetermined scientific, clinical, or policy purposes. A registry database is a file (or files) derived from the registry. Although registries can serve many purposes, this guide focuses on registries created for one or more of the following purposes: to describe the natural history of disease, to determine clinical effectiveness or cost-effectiveness of health care products and services, to measure or monitor safety and harm, and/or to measure quality of care. Registries are classified according to how their populations are defined. For example, product registries include patients who have been exposed to biopharmaceutical products or medical devices. Health services registries consist of patients who have had a common procedure, clinical encounter, or hospitalization. Disease or condition registries are defined by patients having the same diagnosis, such as cystic fibrosis or heart failure. The User’s Guide was created by researchers affiliated with AHRQ’s Effective Health Care Program, particularly those who participated in AHRQ’s DEcIDE (Developing Evidence to Inform Decisions About Effectiveness) program. Chapters were subject to multiple internal and external independent reviews.

Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health was released in September 2019, before the World Health Organization declared COVID-19 a global pandemic in March 2020. Improving social conditions remains critical to improving health outcomes, and integrating social care into health care delivery is more relevant than ever in the context of the pandemic and increased strains placed on the U.S. health care system. The report and its related products ultimately aim to help improve health and health equity, during COVID-19 and beyond. The consistent and compelling evidence on how social determinants shape health has led to a growing recognition throughout the health care sector that improving health and health equity is likely to depend â€" at least in part â€" on mitigating adverse social determinants. This recognition has been bolstered by a shift in the health care sector towards value-based payment, which incentivizes improved health outcomes for persons and populations rather than service delivery alone. The combined result of these changes has been a growing emphasis on health care systems addressing patients' social risk factors and social needs with the aim of improving health outcomes. This may involve health care systems linking individual patients with government and community social services, but important questions need to be answered about when and how health care systems should integrate social care into their practices and what kinds of infrastructure are required to facilitate such activities. Integrating Social Care into the Delivery of Health Care: Moving Upstream to Improve the Nation's Health examines the potential for integrating services addressing social needs and the social determinants of health into the delivery of health care to achieve better health outcomes. This report assesses approaches to social care integration currently being taken by health care providers and systems, and new or emerging approaches and opportunities; current roles in such integration by different disciplines and organizations, and new or emerging roles and types of providers; and current and emerging efforts to design health care systems to improve the nation's health and reduce health inequities.

The Health Care Data Guide is designed to help students and professionals build a skill set specific to using data for improvement of health care processes and systems. Even experienced data users will find valuable resources among the tools and cases that enrich The Health Care Data Guide. Practical and step-by-step, this book spotlights statistical process control (SPC) and develops a philosophy, a strategy, and a set of methods for ongoing improvement to yield better outcomes. Provost and Murray reveal how to put SPC into practice for a wide range of applications including evaluating current process performance, searching for ideas for and determining evidence of improvement, and tracking and documenting sustainability of improvement. A comprehensive overview of graphical methods in SPC includes Shewhart charts, run charts, frequency plots, Pareto analysis, and scatter diagrams. Other topics include stratification and rational sub-grouping of data and methods to help predict performance of processes. Illustrative examples and case studies encourage users to evaluate their knowledge and skills interactively and provide opportunity to develop additional skills and confidence in displaying and interpreting data. Companion Web site: www.josseybass.com/go/provost