Public Health Nurses Improve Efficiency and Quality of Performance Management

Summary

Impact Statement: 
Lorain County Public Health (LCPH) used QI to improve the efficiency of its prenatal/newborn home visiting performance management system, with the result of freeing time that nurses could devote to providing the service, while also improving the quality and utility of the information provided.
Summary: 

To better serve the community, LCPH continuously works on improving the agency performance management system, so it can be fully used to increase knowledge and inform policy and program decisions. As the system expands to new programs, managers and staff are left to find a healthy balance between (1) the time spent on tracking referrals/entering data and (2) gathering data that are relevant to program performance. In one program, a prenatal/newborn home visiting service provided by LCPH public health nurses, a team implemented a QI initiative that substantially improved the quality and efficiency of its performance management system:

  • Average time nurses spent on referral tracking/data entry went from 12.2 hours per week to 9.4 hours per week (23% decrease).
  • Average time the program manager spent on data entry went from 2.6 hours per week to 0.3 hours per week (88% decrease).
  • Number of paper hand-offs went from 12 to 2 (83% decrease). 
Organization that conducted the QI initiative: 
LCPH
Citation: 

Dandurand, M. Public Health Quality Improvement Exchange. Public Health Nurses Improve Efficiency and Quality of Performance Management . Fri, 08/31/2018 - 22:13. Available at http://phqix.org/content/public-health-nurses-improve-efficiency-and-quality-performance-management. Accessed March 28, 2024.

Submission Status: 
Completed
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