What to teach social workers about quality?

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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 part of the Scholar Network to Advance Quality Service (SNAQS), I am working to bring materials about quality to the attention of my profession in the hopes that social work programs will begin teaching these materials to their students.

Starting September 30, I will teach a course on quality to students in the second year of a two year masters degree program in social work. This is a pilot to see how students respond to the content, with the hopes of being able to use the course as a potential platform for spread (shared syllabi, website, materials, etc.). The course is ten weeks long (on a quarter system), with ten 3-hour hour class sessions. There are lots of decisions to be made about what is taught and what is not.

Here are my current thoughts on topics that are "in." Four foci: the quality profession as it relates to social services; monitoring (measuring) for quality; improving quality; and workplace cultures that support quality. Here is a more detailed view:

TOPIC: PROFESSIONALIZATION

Identifying with the history of CQI (Crosby, Deming, Juran, patient safety movement).

What would these folks think of contemporary social service practice?

Certification as a QI professional: where pros /cons

Where to find info. on quality: websites, books, conferences, encouraging people to share best resources

What is QI and why do these people want my time and information? How to introduce and sell QI to an agency.

Professional QI roles: internal change advisors

TOPIC: MONITORING

Dashboards, scorecards

Deciding what to measure / what other people measure

Buy-in, documentation and getting good data into the system

Measurement basics

Chart review methods QSRs – what do you need to know about them and do you need them?

Survey items; survey methods; sampling for surveys; online surveys;

What you can do with spreadsheet, database management and statistical analysis software programs

Assessing for variation; how to do it; profiles; limits and pitfalls

Positive deviance

Pareto charts

Assessing change over time: trend analysis; Run charts; statistical control charts.

Monitoring as part of a quality system; reporting back; to whom?

Giving negative feedback in a way it will be used

Receiving negative feedback on job performance on part of CQI: The tendency to discount

TOPIC: IMPROVEMENT

Improvement cycles (intro)

How do you know you have a problem?

Chartering a team

Choosing a team

Your problem needs a picture

Exploring root causes: Fishbone diagrams RCA software and training; 5 whys

Process flow charts

Problem solving frameworks for QI and our integrated model

Helping teams think of and through solutions: kaizen/ lean tools; IHI’s list of process improvements; TRIZ; SCAMPER Checklists

Your improvement needs a picture

PDSA cycles, small cycles of change, in the context of your project

Putting a change into effect --- motivation, do it, make it happen

Changing professional’s behavior – why is it so hard?A systems perspective. A behavioral perspective

Studying a change effort

So our change works? What next? Who needs to know? When to go to scale?

TOPIC: CULTURE

Bad people or ineffective systems?

What kind of culture do we strive for?

Lenses for thinking about workplace culture and quality: Just culture, Learning Culture, Safe Culture,  High Reliability Organizations

What a just, learning culture does with dirty laundry?

Accountability in just, learning cultures: what to do with human errors, at-risk behavior, reckless behavior?

Measuring culture


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