Quality Café: Ethical Considerations in Quality Improvement

How do core values impact how we design, implement and evaluate improvement projects?

Quality improvement initiatives often directly influence care and services provided to patients and other stakeholders. This may require us to evaluate potential impacts and benefits against guiding core values which set the level of quality the project design will aim to achieve, guide the implementation of the project and measure success to further guide the needed improvements the evaluation will reveal. In this session, we will explore factors that influence the need for ethical assessment of planned improvement projects, and an example of how this ethical evaluation is conducted at the health authority level.