OVC Support Toolkit  >  Quality Improvement 

What is quality improvement?

Quality improvement (QI) involves a series of activities undertaken to reduce the gap between current practice and desired practice. QI offers a way to organise and harmonise the provision of care by engaging service providers at the point of service delivery in reflecting and assessing the performance of their programme and in deciding how they could organise themselves to do their jobs better.

QI builds on the concept that “performance is a characteristic of care provision” and that improvement will occur only when changes are made in the system. Adding inputs to a system will only lead to improvement to the extent they can effect change in that system. QI is based on four core principles :

1. Being client centered: keeping in mind that the needs of the children being served are at the core of what we do (see Listening to the voices of children).
2. Multi-disciplinary team approach: bringing together the range of individuals who make up the team responsible for service delivery efforts to children.
3. Focus on how care is actually provided: examining and modifying the systems and processes used to provide care.
4. Data-based decision making: using data to determine where we are, what are the gaps, what we want to do, whether what we did made a difference.

The quality triangle illustrates how articulating desired outcomes, defining quality, measuring quality and improving quality all work together in a continuous process to make a measurable difference to the children being served by our OVC programmes.

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