A Study of Quality Assessment and Quality Control in an Intensive Care Unit in a Tertiary Care Hospital

Introduction: Quality management is the act of supervising all activities and tasks required to maintain a target degree of excellence.The degree of conformance to established standards and criteria is demonstrated by data gathering and analysis.Quality control is a technique designed to ensure that the performance of services conforms to a predefined set of quality criteria in order to meet the patient's requirements.Despite an array of improvement initiatives in hospitals, the quality of care delivered remains open to question.The purpose of this study was to assess the satisfaction level of patients and their attendants, evaluate the quality of care provided in intensive care unit (ICU) and knowledge regarding quality management among ICU staff. Materials and methods:The efficiency of any healthcare unit is judged by its quality indicators.In this study, various quality indicators used in ICU were used.A self-structured questionnaire was filled by the ICU staff members.The Chi-square test was used to determine the association between the score levels and selected demographic variables which showed significance association between the score level and demographic variables such as age, designation, qualification, and experience.Results: Data revealed that 34.3% of patients and their attendants said that the services provided in the ICU were excellent, 42.1% of the patients and their attendants said that they were always satisfied with the services provided in the ICU.The age of the staff, their designation, qualification, and experience were found to be significant, which means that they had effect on the working standards of the ICU staff.Whereas the variables such as gender and marital status had no effect on the working standards of the staff in ICU as they were found to be insignificant.A total of 66.2% of the staff always had the knowledge regarding the working standards in ICU.To sum up it was concluded that that 94.6% practices followed in ICU were good, 5.4% practices followed in ICU were average, and 0% practices followed in ICU were poor.Conclusion: There were various determinants through the result was calculated.The quality of the ICU according to the patients and their attendants was assessed in which 66.7% of the patients and their attendants said the ICU quality was good.The services provided to the patients and their attendants were assessed.The satisfaction level of the patients and their attendants admitted in ICU and assessing the knowledge of the staff working in the ICU was also seen.