Quality Indicators in Our ICU, a Tool for Improvement
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- Category: Vol. 77, March 2009
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Quality Indicators in Our ICU, a Tool for Improvement!,LAMIA HAMMED, WALIED KAMIL, MAGED ABULMAGD, HESHAM ELAASAR, ALIA ABDUL FATTAH and SHERIF MOKHTAR
Abstract
Study Objective: Patients included in the study were 96 consecutive eligible patients admitted to mixed medical/ surgical ICUs between January, 2008 and March, 2008. Our objective was to use a consensus process to develop a prelim-inary set of quality measures to assess care in our ICU. We built on earlier efforts of the Spanish Society of Intensive Critical Care and Coronary Units (SEMICYUC), in May 2005 to propose specific measures of the structure and process of ICU care. We used an informal iterative consensus process to identify and refine a set of candidate quality measures.
Design: Retrospective cohort study.
Setting: Department of critical care medicine, Cairo university hospitals.
Patients: A total of 96 patients admitted to our ICU from January 2008 to March 2008.
Intervention: None.
Measurements and Main Results: This study was conduct-ed to detect the implementation of a set of indicators that measure the quality of care in intensive care units (ICU) in Cairo university hospitals. The study was done for 3 months in 2 ICUs. All patients were studied for the implementation of the fundamental quality indicators (QI) that was previously published by the Spanish Society of Intensive and Critical Care and Coronary Units (SEMICYUC).
Our results showed that standards (6,14 and 17) were not applicable our ICU. Implementation of indicators 7, 15 and 18 were poorly applied in our ICU. Poor performance was defined as a score of less than 50% of the standard. On the other hand, all other indicators were implemented with different scores in our ICU.
Conclusion: As quality assurance become an important issue in modern ICU practice, ICU quality indicators has become a useful tool to measure ICU quality performance. Our ICU is still lacking implementing quality practice, we need intensive efforts to spread the culture of continuous quality improvement in our ICUs.
Abbreviations:
QI : Quality indicator. ICU: Intensive care unit.