Judith Dixon is a nurse and health visitor for the National Health Service Tayside in Angus, Scotland. She and a team of nurses conducted a QI project through the IHI Open School Quality Improvement Practicum as part of the Early Years Collaborative, a partnership between IHI and NHS Scotland, to improve rates of play among parents and babies in their district. I asked her a few questions about what she learned. (Learn more about the Open School Practicum, which is now available to professionals as well as students, here.)
How did you first become interested in QI?
In the nursing profession, we’re always encouraged to reflect on our practice and make improvements that will benefit our families. So I think it is something that is an inborn part of me!
But I hadn’t really had the opportunity to learn and implement PDSA cycles and quality improvement before taking part in the Early Years Collaborative (EYC). It was really inspiring to attend the kick-off events in Glasgow and hear from other practitioners about how small changes in practice can have such a dramatic impact on children’s lives — as well as how important the early years are.
How did you come up with the idea for your project?
I came up with the idea at one of the EYC events in Glasgow. The team from Angus, Scotland, was talking about the number of resources that are given to new parents by health visitors. We wondered how well parents were using resources such as play@home, which is a kit of play activities for parents to do with babies and toddlers.
This led me to question my own practice in distributing play@home. At that time, I would normally have given the resource at the first home visit. This would be just after the baby is 10 days old.
[For more of this story, written by Stephanie Garry Garfunkel, go to http://www.ihi.org/education/i...c64a9e912&ID=213]
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