Quality Improvement In Public Health

The main concept of this article is the improvement of Public Health infrastructure in the United States. Concerns of the public health system started to arise after the attacks of September 11, 2001 and other natural disaster that devastated the Gulf Coastal area. There were concerns from elected officials that the public health system was long-neglected and needed to be updated at all levels of the government (Brewer, Joly, Mason, Tews, & Thielen, 2007).

There was much emphasis place on Quality Improvement which was part major initiatives for quality improvement in public health by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Public Health Quality Forum (PHQF) in August of 2008. The goals of implementing QI into public health included

This phase also included 75 local health department of Minnesota Department of Health focus it main efforts to integrate QI into the public health practice. They started by targeting eight problem areas and developing eight QI corresponding projects, which resulted in seven of those areas with positive outcomes (Brewer, Joly, Mason, Tews, & Thielen, 2007). A large percentage of the participants indicated that the efforts of building a QI culture would be very effective and would use the QI practice methods in future projects. The Minnesota Collaborative decided to share the lessons learned results with the rest of the local public health departments across the state. The lesson learned from the eight project would be essential to QI improvement throughout the state, such lesson as the best practices to use for teaching and implementing QI in clinical practice in support of QI culture in public health at local and state level (Brewer, Joly, Mason, Tews, & Thielen, 2007). Other lessons learned would include the importance of using evidence-based intervention whenever possible. When making slight modifications to an existing QI model may make the models more acceptable to those in the public service setting (Brewer, Joly, Mason, Tews, & Thielen, 2007). Allowing staff members to have the ability to

This IHI model focused on the use of tobacco and exposure to secondhand smoke. The DHEC clinics were already in the process of implementing a tobacco screening process throughout their clinics and saw that the IHI model would be a good fit to help implement QI activities. The SC DHEC has a centralized and integrated organizational and operational structure, which made it easy to adapt the IHI model into DHEC system of operation. Because of the IHI model appropriate training of staff on the QI methodology and timely technical assistance were essential for the staff and would ensure proper implementation of the QI methods (Brewer, Joly, Mason, Tews, & Thielen,