1. Social work students intuitively understood that the social service agencies they loved had quality problems. Every one I know in the social services understands this. But few talk about it. These students knew the arenas in which their agencies … Continue reading
Update 2 from my pilot course on Quality Monitoring and Improvement for the Social Services: It was great fun watching social service students catch on to the idea of improvement cycles, charters, and how to know if your change is … Continue reading
If we are going to move the practice of quality monitoring and improvement into social service agencies, then schools of social work will need to get in the game of educating their students about quality tools, concepts and management. As … Continue reading
So I went out of the country and avoided the news media and the New York Times sports a piece on quality improvement in the social services, about how the Toyota corporation ran improvement events (Kaizen events) for the New … Continue reading
Tim Wood, a middle aged civil servant sits at a metal 1963 vintage Steelcase desk. A pile of forms stuff an inbox in the upper left portion of his desk. There is not a computer in sight. In a … Continue reading
I think ASQ is awesome. I think it is amazing that there is an organization that wants to spread the word about quality. I am a member. I liked them on Facebook. I have bought about $500 worth of quality … Continue reading
Courses on quality improvement are all over schools of nursing and medicine, but not my field, social work. Social work has continued to teach Program Evaluation to our masters students, even when so few of our graduates engage themselves in … Continue reading
Last year, the ASQ journal Quality Progress published an article on the 7 new quality tools, meant as an update to the 7 classic quality tools known to many quality professionals (affinity diagrams, tree diagrams, interrelationship digraphs, process decision program … Continue reading
The current issue of Quality and Safety in Healthcare contains an incisive editorial by Kaveh Shojania and Eric Thomas about why the QI field has not been able to demonstrate widespread improvements in patient safety as a result of their efforts. … Continue reading
Lack of money and time. Lack of buy-in. Competing demands. Lack of training and skills. Lack of authority. Lack of research capacity. Ever-changing requirements from accreditors, funders and licensing bodies. These were the major challenges reported by 16 quality professionals … Continue reading