We will acknowledge quite a few times throughout the guide that modern healthcare systems are complex. In fact when you try and picture just how complex they are it can be mind-boggling! We have dozens of different job roles and the different grades/seniorities within these, hundreds of different care pathways, and services in different settings such as hospital wards, GP practices, theatres, outpatient clinics, peoples’ own homes etc. These all interact with each other to deliver the best care possible to individual patients.
What this means is when trying to make improvements there are innumerable factors that influence the results of our efforts, many more than we could directly influence or even possibly track. The QI methodology we will cover is effective because it is designed to be used in systems as complex as this. To understand how, let’s take a look at where it came from.