Assuming that you’re working in a hospital QA setting, you can get some information about current practices to improve health care at the following sites.
http://www.leapfroggroup.org you can search to find out if your facility participates in the Leap Frog for patient safety survey. And, you can find out how your hospital is doing for various measures. If your facility does participate in this survey, look around on the site to find out about the leap from survey and it’s purpose in the big picture of improving health care quality in case it comes up during your interview.
JCAHO also has a site http://www.qualitycheck.org that you can surf around to find out how your hospital is doing with heart attack care, heart failure care, pneumonia and other measures. Become familiar with what JCAHO is interested in with regard to quality of care.
The Institute for Healthcare Improvement http://www.ihi.org is an informative site. This organization recently kicked off a nationwide campaign called 100,000 Lives. The campaign focuses on 6 interventions that it is asking hospitals to implement and measure that will improve quality of health care. Since you have a background in critical care, the interventions that this campaign is promoting will make sense to you. Not sure if your particular hospital is formally participating, but it might be good info to know in case they are. If not, the site is packed with very good information related to Quality Improvement and Quality Assurance.
QA is an exciting and growing field in health care today. It is especially exciting for the nursing profession to be involved in because we’ve always advocated quality and we have valuable input to achieve it.
Best of Luck to you.
