NHPCO NewsLine Winter 2021 - 23

Improving Quality
One Ring at a Time
NHPCO's Quality Connections (QC) program has been running since January
2021 and its increasing momentum has excited us and reinforced the reason, we
developed it.
Quality Connections is a national program designed to support hospice and
palliative care provider delivery of high-quality, person-centered care. The
program goals are to enhance the knowledge base, skills, and competency of
hospice and palliative care staff through education, tools, resources, and
opportunities for engagement and interaction among hospice and palliative
care quality professionals.
QC participants are required to achieve milestones within defined timeframes
by completing activities in the program's four pillars: Education, application,
measurement, and innovation. When they meet the completion threshold for
each pillar, they earn that pillar's ring, similar to closing activity rings in the
Apple Watch app.
The activities in each quality pillar in QC are designed to help participants
achieve higher standards in organizational operations, quality of patient care,
and service excellence. Therefore, everything they accomplish in the program
moves quality forward. Our participants are actively engaged in completing
their pillar rings throughout a calendar year. We structured the program this
way because quality improvement is a journey and achieving higher
performance levels is not an instant process. This format also reinforces the
principle that incremental progress in achieving quality goals should be
celebrated as a win.
NHPCO was excited when Calvert Hospice in southern Maryland was the first to
earn all four pillar rings this summer. Their organization was engaged in the
program from the launch and embraced their commitment to performance
improvement through the continuous quality improvement process. Sarah
Simmons from Calvert Hospice shared that, " Much of what we found so valuable
about the QC program is that it's not just work for work's sake - the elements in
each ring are relevant to the work that we do each day and gave us opportunities
to both improve existing quality activities as well as embrace new ones " .
Newsline / Winter 2021 23
https://www.nhpco.org/qualityconnections/
NHPCO NewsLine Winter 2021

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of NHPCO NewsLine Winter 2021
