Incorporating Quality Improvement Concepts and Practice into a Community Health Nursing Course

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Community health nursing students learned to incorporate continuous quality improvement (CQI) methods in their community health clinical settings. With the help of faculty guides, the students, clinical faculty, and key personnel from the community site collaborated on improvement projects that contributed to the agency's ongoing mission. Successful implementation of the CQI principles improved clinical operations, as well as patient care. In addition, the projects contributed to improved student and faculty satisfaction with the overall community experience. Students completed the projects and their clinical rotation with a sense of making a genuine contribution to the agency, and faculty reflected that the students were more engaged and invested in the project outcomes. AUTHORS Received: February 16, 2005 Accepted: June 30, 2005 Ms. Teeley is Clinical Assistant Professor, Dr. Lowe is Associate Professor and Chair, Health Care Administration, Dr. Beal is Professor and Associate Dean, Department of Nursing, and Ms. Knapp is Lecturer, Health Care Administration, Simmons College, School for Health Studies, Boston, Massachusetts. Address correspondence to Karen H. Teeley, MS, RN, AHN-C, Clinical Assistant Professor, Simmons College, School for Health Studies, 300 The Fenway, Boston, MA 02071; e-mail: teeley@simmons.edu.