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Healthcare Quality Week

Healthcare quality professionals work in every healthcare setting to enhance care delivery, optimize value, and improve outcomes in patient safety, regulatory and accreditation, quality review and accountability, performance and process improvement, health data analytics, population health, and care transitions. Healthcare Quality Week (HQW), brought to you by the National Association of Healthcare Quality is a dedicated time to celebrate the profession and raise awareness of the positive impact healthcare quality professionals have in their organizations and communities.

Quality Improvement Courses for Professionals

Healthcare providers, community organizations, hospital systems, government agencies, and all other stakeholders in children’s health can use QI to address current challenges in serving their communities. To help future change agents develop and implement successful strategies, NICHQ has developed Quality Improvement 101 and Quality Improvement 102, digital courses that explain the fundamentals of improvement.

Quality Improvement 101: The fundamentals of change that lead to quality improvement
Quality Improvement 102: The next step in understanding how change leads to improvement.

doctor with white long white curly hair and glasses sitting next to Black pregnant patient with long tightly coiled hair, a gray shirt, and dark pants

Quality Improvement Articles & Webinars

Committed professionals and organizations nationwide work diligently for improvements in maternal and child health, unfortunately, disparate efforts, poorly defined or misaligned initiatives, and social determinants affecting health make improvement a highly complex and challenging endeavor. Below are helpful resources from NICHQ to assist in your quality improvement work.

Addressing Racial Equity

In the U.S., the gap in health outcomes between non-Hispanic Black and non-Hispanic white children continues to widen, with children of color more frequently suffering from chronic and preventable health conditions. Without both a health and racial equity lens, organizations risk driving ineffective change by not first taking into consideration the structural factors influencing children’s health.

Be a Children's Health Change Agent

Like you, we have a shared passion for improving the health of every child in every state across the country. Join us in our mission. Take action to make a difference for children now and in the decades to come:

Donate. Give a gift that supports NICHQ’s initiatives that touch millions of children’s lives. Every dollar raised benefits the health and well-being of children.
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Related Articles for Healthcare Quality Professionals

3 Lessons from Centering Community Voices: Safe Sleep and Breastfeeding Using a Quality Improvement Framework

Quality improvement (QI) work is driven by an interest in implementing changes that lead to improvements. In breastfeeding and safe sleep work, this can be challenging. It can be difficult to fully and accurately understand the source of maternal and child health inequities. Learn how National Action Partnership to Promote Safe Sleep Improvement in Innovation Network (NAPPSS-IIN) project confronted these challenges and found that community-based participatory quality improvement might hold the answer. As NAPPSS-IIN concludes its fifth year of breastfeeding and safe sleep work, three key lessons have emerged about the value of community voice in breastfeeding and safe sleep quality improvement.

3 Strategies to Leverage Community-Based Research in Maternal and Child Health

During Spring 2021 DARE conducted a series of community listening sessions for the National Action Partnership to Promote Safe Sleep Improvement and Innovation Network (NAPPSS-IIN). Listening session participants were asked about the resources and tools that help them promote safe sleep and breastfeeding/chestfeeding, and additional support needed to meet community safe sleep and breastfeeding/chestfeeding needs. While the analytic results are forthcoming, DARE is excited to share key lessons learned during NAPPSS-IIN community listening sessions.

Incorporating Quality Improvement in Public Health

From my recent experience at the Infant Mortality Summits, it seems that the time is ripe for the widespread growth of quality improvement strategies in the public health arena, says Lloyd Provost.

QI Initiative Brings National Changes to Breastfeeding Support

The NICHQ-led Best Fed Beginnings initiative has made it possible for 218,000 more babies to be born in Baby-Friendly hospitals every year. Collaboration was essential because of the complex challenges for creating better breastfeeding support.

Quality Improvement: A Necessary Addition to the Maternal and Child Health Tool Belt

MCH Practice Fellow Avery Desrosiers shares how quality improvement can affect maternal and child health and how it encourages innovative changes within specific communities to improve health outcomes for vulnerable populations.

Using Quality Improvement to Address Racial Equity

In the U.S., the gap in health outcomes between non-Hispanic black and non-Hispanic white children continues to widen, with children of color more frequently suffering from chronic and preventable health conditions. Incorporating both a health and racial equity lens can help us drive sustainable improvements and counteract the role racism plays as key determinant of health. Here are four pieces of advice for applying that lens.

Setting the Stage for Sustainability in Quality Improvement Projects

In all types of quality improvement efforts, sustainability is a vital consideration that often goes overlooked until the project’s final stages. With the right balance of foresight and strategy, however, team leaders can plan for sustainability as a project gets underway.

What Quality Improvement Means to Healthcare and Public Health

Quality improvement (QI) methods provide the structure and tools to test, refine and adopt changes that lead to improvements. However, the characteristics of quality don’t have the same meaning to everyone working in the health space.

Why Applying Quality Improvement Techniques to Non-clinical Data Makes Sense

The growing trend of increasing capacity and timeliness of collecting surveillance data (such as birth and death records used by epidemiologists) is opening up opportunities for these rich data sources to be used for quality improvement efforts.