Continuous Quality Improvement in a Community Teaching Hospital

The purpose of this report is to describe the workings of continuous quality improvement (CQI) in a nonprofit community teaching hospital. An earlier report reviewed the adoption by a hospital system of CQI and discussed the implications and opportunities for the discipline of hospital epidemiology.1 This article will further develop the theme of CQI, discussed in recent months in Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology2-4 and other journals,58 by offering a case history of one hospital's journey down the CQI management pathway-the origins, the aids, and the barriers to adoption, the development of the first CQI teams, and future prospects.