The Excellence through Quality Improvement Project team and two of the project’s quality improvement coaches provided a full-day adapted Introduction to IDEAS (Quality Improvement) training session with staff from various services and programs of Centre de santé communautaire CHIGAMIK Community Health Centre (CSC Chigamik CHC) on Jan. 31. Participants included physicians, mental health counsellors, addictions counsellors, intake workers, front desk staff and physiotherapists.
CSC Chigamik CHC provides a vast range of mental health and addictions services to their clients, serving the Midland and Penetang community. Priority populations for this CHC are Francophone and Aboriginal communities. The E-QIP team provided an adapted Introduction to IDEAS program to Chigamik staff, and helped them apply quality improvement tools to three pre-identified areas of focus. The staff wanted to use QI methods to look at issues relating to low service utilization rates by the Francophone community, inconsistent referrals between internal programs, and no-show rates for appointments. QI tools and methods were applied to each problem to help clearly define the underlying issues and staff began to develop change ideas to address each challenge.
QI coaches also worked with the staff to discuss the meaning of quality from the perspective of the client, staff, organization and health system. Chigamik and E-QIP QI coaches will work together to draft a vision for QI within this CHC to help inform the work of their newly formed quality committee. The participants of this training session were highly motivated to implement QI tools and interested in exploring how clients can be engaged in QI decisions and planning.
Chigamik will be joining the E-QIP training on Design Thinking happening Feb. 15 in Toronto with other organizations in the sector. Design Thinking is a method that puts the needs of people experiencing a problem at the core of the process so that solutions can address real needs and problems.
For more information and to stay updated on all E-QIP news, please contact the E-QIP team at quality@e-qip.ca .