for Organizational Improvement
A service of the Children's Bureau, US Department of Health and Human Services
- QI Corner • QI Links • QI Resources and Publications • Quality Improvement Systems
Quality
Improvement T/TA Planned for 2005 (Spring, 2005)
The first issue of Child Welfare Matters
summarizes the NRCOI’s ongoing training and technical assistance
(T/TA) services and our new role in coordinating T/TA across the Children’s
Bureau NRCs. As part of this overview, I will highlight our planned quality
improvement (QI) work for the coming year and some examples of how child
welfare agencies can use our services.
As with all the NRCOI’s training and technical assistance work, we customize our QI approach to the unique needs of each agency. However, based on recent experience with agencies, we plan to focus on several broad QI topics this year:
Create and implement Program Improvement Plan (PIP) measurement strategies. One requirement of state PIPs is a strategy to measure outcomes and demonstrate improvement on key CFSR items. NRCOI staff have assisted a number of states with their PIP measurement strategies, including developing new qualitative case reviews modeled on the CFSR, adapting the CFSR instrument or formulating new ones, training case reviewers, co-leading on-site reviews, and facilitating inter-rater reliability among state reviewers.
Develop a CQI implementation framework for child welfare. The NRCOI is partnering with Casey Family Programs to develop a framework describing what agencies must do to develop and implement real and sustainable continuous quality improvement (CQI) systems. In February, 2005 national experts met to develop the framework, which will include key CQI principles, com-ponents, and measures. Our goal is to create a framework that can serve as both the basis for a CQI Breakthrough Series Collaborative and as a stand-alone, useable guide for child welfare agencies.
Facilitate QI kick-off meetings. The NRCOI has worked with a number of states in the past year to develop and facilitate QI kick-off meetings. Generally, states use these meetings to communicate with internal and external stakeholders about new QI initiatives and engage them in the QI process going forward. NRCOI staff co-facilitate these meetings with agency leaders and QI staff. While the meeting content varies somewhat across states, some common focus areas include sharing leadership’s vision for QI, teaching participants how to review and analyze data and information, helping participants use QI results to plan and make improvements, modeling the work of CQI committees, and sharing information on effective, existing QI practices in the state.
Develop a national QI peer network. The NRCOI believes facilitating peer-to-peer contact is one of the most powerful forms of providing T/TA. To that end, we plan to convene a national QI peer network in 2005 and hold a series of conference calls to share ideas, information and questions across child welfare agencies. The peers involved in the network will help define the conference call topics and other activities that would share QI expertise. We will contact QI staff from various states in the coming months, but we also would like to hear directly from anyone interested in taking part.
If you have any questions about these examples or if
you need more information, please get in touch!
Thanks, Peter
Other QI Corner Topics
The Critical Role of Stakeholders
in Continuous Quality Improvement (CQI) (Fall, 2005)
Use Your PIP to Help
Transform QA to QI (Winter, 2004)
Child Welfare Leadership and Quality Assurance
(Spring, 2003)
Developing and piloting qualitative case review
systems (Winter, 2003)
