Quality Improvement in Nursing | Smartsheet

Quality improvement theory in nursing is the same as in healthcare generally.

Beginning two decades ago, many nursing educators began advocating for nursing schools to do more to teach quality improvement theory to nurses.

“In the future, the clinical and economic interests of nurses will depend heavily on their ability to improve quality,” Linda Norman, a Senior Associate Dean for Academics at Vanderbilt University’s School of Nursing, wrote in the journal Nursing Outlook in 2001.

“Thus, to advance as a profession in the years ahead, nurses will need good data on measures of quality that are linked to nursing, and they will need to know how to use this data to continuously improve the quality of nursing care,” she noted.

Since then, nursing schools have been increasingly teaching quality improvement theory and methods in their education programs.

One umbrella effort has been the Quality and Safety Education for Nurses Institute — or QSEN Institute — housed at the Frances Payne Bolton School of Nursing at Case Western University. The institute is a collaboration between nursing and healthcare leaders who gather the best information on good nursing and healthcare practices.

“What it does is outline all the information new registered nurses should know,” says Katreena Collette Merrill, Associate Dean of Undergraduate Studies and an Associate Professor in Nursing at Brigham Young University. “It really set the standards for nursing education. When I came from the healthcare environment and went to academics full-time, they weren’t really talking about improvement as much as they were talking about the basics (or nursing). Now, they’re teaching the principles” of quality improvement.

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Learn more about the history of quality improvement and about leaders who developed the concept — in general and in healthcare — in “Continuous Quality Improvement in Healthcare: Principles, Process, and Tools.”