Abstract
Few clinical sub-specialties require the kind of dedicated interdisciplinary involvement as burn surgery. There are countless opportunities for quality improvement (QI) interventions to optimize the care that is delivered for these patients at each stage. This chapter defines quality improvement and outlines its scope, introduces some of the various instruments and methods used for QI interventions, and highlights selected QI strategies as they pertain to burn care at the macro- and microsystem level. Principles and opportunities for benchmarking, verification and reporting are also included. The great challenge in relatively well-developed burn centres is to maintain a quality improvement focus in the execution of all activities, and to constantly evaluate how local practices can adapt to generalizable knowledge, while also advocating for prevention of burn injury and improvements in burn care in less developed settings.
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Rogers, A.D., Rode, H. (2020). Quality Improvement in Burn Care. In: Jeschke, M., Kamolz, LP., Sjöberg, F., Wolf, S. (eds) Handbook of Burns Volume 1. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18940-2_8
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