Quality Assurance

CONCEPT 2

CONCEPT OF QUALITY ASSURANCE

2.0 INTRODUCTION/DEFINITION OF CONCEPT

Over the past 45 years, there has been considerable work on the evaluation of the quality of nursing care to determine what good care is, whether the care nurses give is appropriate and effective, and whether the quality of care provided is good. Evaluating the quality of nursing care is an essential part of professional accountability. Quality assurance implies that efforts are made to evaluate and ensure quality health care.

Quality assurance is an on-going systematic comprehensive evaluation of healthcare services and the impact of those services on healthcare services.

Nurses in quality assurance promote quality and cost-effective outcomes for an organization which they achieve by analysing, interpreting and applying policies and procedure guidelines. It is important they identify the needs of

Licensure – It entails checking the contract between a professional body and a nation that guarantees her control over entry into and exits from the profession and over quality of professional practice. Usually the licencing process requires writing laws to define the scopes and limits of the professional practice (John, 2007). Accreditation – In nursing, this is one of the major tools in quality assurance employed. It is checking the nurse academic programmes to know if it is in line with the minimum laid down standards.

QA in nursing ensure quality, the International Council of Nurses established standards that are used by the national bodies to inspect nursing programmes while other agencies

Accreditation process objectives are designed to ensure that least minimum standards documents are attained, enhanced and