Five whys

Franklin County Public Health: This QI project sought to improve client satisfaction with Environmental Health programs, focusing for this project on the water quality partnership program. Understanding client satisfaction in programs that are fee-based, such as environmental health, can improve...

The county health department improved their planning processes for community meetings so that community partners would more actively collaborate in a community health improvement process and together make a stronger impact on priority health issues.

Yadkin-County Health department used QI tools and methods decrease the time for notifying clients of abnormal Pap smear results, enabling clients to make informed decisions about follow-up care.

Cumberland County Health Department achieved dramatic improvements in the quality of services offered by their Adult Health Clinic through a Kaizen event. Prescription refill wait times decreased from as long as 6 weeks to less than 72 hours, and referrals to specialists, many of which had lengthy...

This six-county health district department used QI to achieve a 75% increase in response to satisfaction surveys by customers of their environmental health services.

The state health department developed a training program for public health staff at the state and local levels to apply continuous quality improvement in their delivery of public health services, in turn resulting in better health outcomes for the people of North Carolina.

The Health Department improved the process for obtaining birth and death certificates so customers weren’t forced to miss time from work or take other extraordinary steps to obtain these vital documents in a timely fashion.

An urban local health department found that 35% of mid-level staff did not know who to contact for questions about new department programs and services. This workforce development QI project led to development of a common resource packet that enabled staff to respond more quickly and effectively...

This 10-county District health department improved the processes of immunization clinic scheduling, preparation and follow-up and reduced the number of “no shows” , leading to greater efficiency and capacity. The improved process and staff training were then standardized across the 10 counties.

By implementing more accurate Medicaid billing procedures that resulted in an increase in Medicaid match revenue, the local health department was able to re-direct funds to necessary departmental strategic priorities that benefit the health of the local community.

The local health department increased the number of infants and children receiving needed vaccines as part of a WIC visit, rather than referring them to another site and potentially losing that opportunity to protect them from getting a preventable disease or transmitting a vaccine-preventable...

The health department discovered that most of its employees were unaware of the many of the Department’s media activities for outreach and education. The department made several changes to increase employee awareness of current and new media efforts and achieved a major improvement on all three of...

The county health department used a QI planning approach to improve their planning processes for community meetings resulting in the community becoming more involved in improving its own health.