Introductory description

This module focuses on current challenges facing healthcare quality & productivity. It will familiarize students with the urgent need to apply approaches from diverse disciplines for patient safety, quality, and productivity improvement in health service from a systems perspective. Students will learn to apply systematic approaches in the analysis of data & information for quality and efficiency. Module will examine current techniques used for quality & productivity improvement in healthcare such as lean, Six Sigma, loss functions, etc. Service improvement strategies will also be examined in the context of regulatory, patient safety and economic factors that are unique to healthcare and what information is necessary for sustained improvement.

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

1. Theories and concepts involving quality and productivity in healthcare including CQI, TQM, lean, six sigma, etc.
2. Metrics and measures of healthcare quality and productivity.
3. Techniques used to model health care processes for service redesign and improvement.
4. Use of statistical tools and analysis of health care data to generate improvements.
5. Incentivizing health care processes for quality and productivity improvement.
6. Factors necessary for sustained quality and productivity management.

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Critique tools and approaches used by health care organizations to assess quality risks and failures.
• Synthesize evidence involving efficiency, effectiveness and return on investment in the context of health services.
• Comprehensively understand ways to engage patients and other stakeholders in quality and productivity improvement.
• Systematically analyze health care data and information, interpret results and meaningfully draw conclusions.
• Critique methodologies of quality and productivity improvement studies in healthcare.

Indicative reading list

Generic Reading lists can be found in Talis

Specific reading list for the module can be found on

Research element

The module incorporates elements of research design, steps in the process of research, identifying problems and questions contextualized to a given healthcare quality problems, specifying a purpose for quality improvement, reviewing current evidence and issues of ethics and regulations when investigating /examining quality problems.

Interdisciplinary

Healthcare operational management is a new emerging discipline that combines health science methodologies with engineering, statistics, quantitative elements of management with data science for quality and productivity improvement in the healthcare sector. This module focusses on familiarizing students with quality assurance underpinned data modelling and analysis.

Subject specific skills

-mathematical and data analysis skills
-understanding metrics and measures
-awareness of evidence based practices

Transferable skills

-critical thinking
-problem solving
-data and information literacy