Teaching a new approach to quality improvement

Whatever the educator's role in teaching quality methods, rapid, industry-wide changes in quality practices are having a profound impact on the education department. Familiar, comfortable teaching methods for monitoring and evaluation have disappeared. Clinical practice models, long the mainstay of nursing education, have become obsolete in today's multidisciplined environment. This article describes a new approach to quality improvement that utilizes a model expanded beyond clinical practice: a tri-focus of patient, staff, and system, integrated with the four broad-based categories of standards (structure, outcome, process, and evaluation) to achieve quality improvement within the organization.