Closing the Skill Gap: 5 Tactics to Improve Your Healthcare Quality and Patient Safety Teams’ Competencies
The Healthcare Quality Competency Framework, developed by NAHQ, reveals significant skill gaps in critical areas of healthcare quality and safety. This article explores 5 actionable tactics to help your team close these gaps and ensure your facility meets its quality and safety goals. Discover how to assess competencies, foster continuous learning, and leverage strategic outsourcing to enhance your team’s capabilities.
⏰ 15 min read
Published on February 8, 2023
What is the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework?
The Healthcare Quality Competency Framework is a set of guidelines, standards, and definitions of the proficiencies and competencies that healthcare quality professionals across the continuum of care should meet. The National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) developed the framework with experts from various settings, including health systems, acute care, long-term care, managed care, primary care, and more. The framework consists of 8 domains of quality and safety, 29 competency statements, and 486 proprietary and unpublished skill statements.
The 2022 Healthcare Quality and Safety Workforce Report by the National Association for Healthcare Quality (NAHQ) reveals that while there has been great progress in the field, there remain significant and troubling skill gaps in certain competency areas across the workforce.
“The healthcare workforce is focused too narrowly on 3 domains of quality, at the expense of the others. This is particularly troubling because high performance in all 8 domains is the key to leveraging healthcare goals of today and tomorrow,” the report states.
NAHQ strongly recommends that current and future workforce readiness should be a major and urgent strategic focus for hospitals.
Given the findings of this report, your healthcare quality team may self-report as being ill-equipped or even deficient in more than half of the competency areas. So how should the leader of a healthcare quality or patient safety team assess and accelerate their team’s competencies in line with the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework to ensure they can achieve their organization’s quality and safety goals?
In this article, we’ll share several actionable tactics to help you address this challenge, including how clinical data management in healthcare can play a critical role in improving team performance and quality outcomes.
More Focus Required in 5 Key Areas of the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework
Too often, healthcare quality is thought of only in terms of meeting regulatory requirements and receiving official approval or recognition.
This legacy perspective, which is based largely on retrospective reviews and compliance, must evolve to a more proactive approach if healthcare facilities are to achieve ambitious safety and quality objectives. This was the very challenge that NAHQ sought to address when it developed the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework in 2019.
In 2022, NAHQ assessed the healthcare workforce to evaluate the current level of work being performed compared to the framework. They encountered some alarming findings, which they detailed in their Healthcare Quality and Safety Workforce Report.
A nationwide survey of 2,523 professionals across various job titles revealed that most advanced work in healthcare quality and safety is concentrated in just three domains:
Regulatory and accreditation,
Patient safety, and
Quality leadership and integration.
However, the remaining five domains, which are crucial to a more comprehensive and effective approach to healthcare quality, are not receiving sufficient focus. These domains include:
Health data analytics,
Performance and process improvement,
Population health and care transitions,
Professional engagement, and
Quality review and accountability.
By addressing these underrepresented domains, healthcare leaders can better align with the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework. Improving focus on areas like health data analytics also involves better clinical data management in healthcare, which ensures that data-driven decisions lead to improved patient outcomes.
The Healthcare Quality Competency Framework
Unlike many industries, a large portion of the field didn’t study and receive undergraduate or advanced degrees in patient safety and healthcare quality.
“Many people working in quality and safety come to the work as a second profession and/or with little formal training in quality and safety,” the NAHQ report states. “Leaders assigning other leaders and staff to these roles have lacked a way to clearly articulate the work that needs to be done to achieve bold quality and safety goals. It is one thing to set quality goals, and it is another for organizations to prepare individuals and teams to achieve these goals. The next-level goals in healthcare require organizations and individuals to think differently about quality and how to achieve it. Mental models and organizational constructs built from historical reference points will not suffice in the future.”
To remedy this knowledge gap, NAHQ developed the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework — a set of guidelines, standards, and definitions of the proficiencies and competencies that healthcare quality professionals across the continuum of care should meet for healthcare quality. It was developed by experts from various settings, including health systems, acute care, long-term care, managed care, primary care, and more.
The Healthcare Quality Competency Framework consists of 8 domains of quality and safety, 29 competency statements, and 486 proprietary skill statements. Each domain focuses on specific competencies:
Professional engagement Engage in the healthcare quality profession with a commitment to practicing ethically, enhancing one’s competence, and advancing the field.
Quality leadership and integration Advance the organization’s commitment to healthcare quality through collaboration, learning opportunities, and communication. Lead the integration of quality into the fabric of the organization through a coordinated infrastructure to achieve organizational objectives.
Performance and process improvement Use performance and process improvement (PPI), project management, and change management methods to support operational and clinical quality initiatives, improve performance, and achieve organizational goals.
Health data and analytics Leverage the organization’s analytic environment to help guide data-driven decision-making and inform quality improvement initiatives.
Population health and care transitions Evaluate and improve healthcare processes and care transitions to advance the efficient, effective, and safe care of defined populations.
Regulatory and accreditation Direct organization-wide processes for evaluating, monitoring, and improving compliance with internal and external requirements. Lead the organization’s processes to prepare for, participate in, and follow up on regulatory, accreditation, and certification surveys and activities.
Patient safety Cultivate a safe healthcare environment by promoting safe practices, nurturing a just culture, and improving processes that detect, mitigate, or prevent harm.
Quality review and accountability Direct activities that support compliance with voluntary, mandatory, and contractual reporting requirements for data acquisition, analysis, reporting, and improvement.
This detailed framework offers valuable structure for leaders to assess individual and team competencies, identify skill gaps, and design training programs. Additionally, focusing on data integrity in healthcare ensures that the data used for quality evaluations is reliable, supporting more accurate performance assessments.
5 Tactics to Accelerate Your Healthcare Quality or Patient Safety Team’s Competencies
Adopting the five tactics below will help your healthcare quality and patient safety teams meet all eight domains’ foundational competencies and capabilities, particularly those identified by the NAHQ report as underrepresented. These strategies will allow your organization to achieve its quality and safety goals.
1. Survey Your Staff
Start by getting an honest assessment of your quality and safety teams’ competencies and gaps. Ask them about their perceived strengths and weaknesses based on the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework. If time were not a factor, what continuing education would they prioritize?
Surveying your staff before creating a learning and development program tailored to NAHQ standards will help you design initiatives that meet their specific needs and learning preferences. This approach also ensures that you accurately identify skill gaps that need to be addressed.
2. Free Up Time for Them to Grow Their Knowledge Base
It’s unlikely that your team can simply work harder to close competency gaps. You need to free up blocks of time to allow them to focus on professional development. Prioritize this new free time and ensure that the organization is prepared to fund this essential growth.
One effective way to accomplish this is by conducting a departmental functions audit. Identify which tasks are part of your team’s core competency (improving patient care) and which are non-core functions that could be outsourced.
Many leading healthcare teams are turning to the strategy of Smartsourcing. Smartsourcing is a business strategy of shifting towards partnerships that focus an organization on its core competencies and core mission, and to then shed the processes that are not core to the organization’s mission to a partner.
One example of this can be seen in the hospitals across the country that ‘smartsource’ their data abstraction workload to American Data Network. These organizations are reinventing their approach to data, focusing less on adding ever more data to an information black hole and instead organizing more resources around producing insight from the data and, most importantly, acting on it to accelerate change. This doesn’t mean they neglect data collection. Rather, they’re smarter in how they collect it by leveraging a trusted smartsourcing partner to handle the more routine task of data collection so they can concentrate their precious and scarce personnel on more advanced roles like analysts and change agents.
Your organization might consider data abstraction smartsourcing as a first step. Freeing up staff time by partnering with a reliable smartsourcing provider enables your team to focus on improving quality teams and upskilling their capabilities. After dedicating time to professional development, your staff can then apply their newfound skills to more impactful performance and process improvement initiatives.
3. Create an Accelerated Workforce Development Program
Once your team has enough time to refocus on growing their skill sets, you need to create an accelerated workforce development program to provide constant training and education. An effective program ensures they stay current with the latest healthcare quality and patient safety trends and practices.
Creating an effective accelerated workforce development program involves several key steps that include: identifying skill gaps in your department, defining the objectives and goals of your program, developing a curriculum, identifying and securing funding, and monitoring and measuring success.
Here are some ways to provide ongoing training and development opportunities for your team:
Utilize the NAHQ Workforce Accelerator program to develop healthcare quality competencies in your workforce and accelerate the achievement of your quality and performance improvement goals through a multi-phased approach.
Pair team members with mentors to offer personalized coaching and help them acquire the skills they need to excel in their roles.
Offer opportunities for them to attend workshops, conferences, and other professional development events that provide real-world insights and networking with peers.
Encourage or require your team to pursue certification and licensure in areas related to healthcare quality, such as the Certified Professional in Healthcare Quality (CPHQ), to ensure your team remains competitive and well-prepared.
These are just a few ways to provide ongoing learning and development. It will help your team learn the skills and competencies they need to succeed in their healthcare quality and patient safety roles.
4. Secure Funding for Your Workforce Development Program
A successful workforce development program requires sufficient resources. Without funding, the development program won’t be able to purchase resources and meet expenses such as training materials, course costs, etc. Here are some tips for getting senior leadership buy-in and securing the critical funding you need:
Demonstrate the ROI of the Initiative
To secure funding, you need to clearly demonstrate the ROI of the workforce development program to senior leadership. One way to do this is by quantifying the potential savings associated with improved outcomes, such as reduced errors, enhanced safety and quality, and greater operational efficiency. Leveraging data abstraction outsourcing can also be highlighted as a strategy to improve performance while reducing administrative burdens, freeing up your team to focus on strategic goals.
Demonstrate How the Initiative Will Fill Skill Gaps
Conduct a needs assessment or use data from external benchmarks to identify skill and talent gaps within your workforce. Once identified, demonstrate to senior leadership how the development program will effectively address these gaps. This step can be further reinforced by presenting data on how clinical data management in healthcare can lead to improved accuracy and efficiency, ultimately driving better outcomes.
Citing authoritative sources, such as the NAHQ report, can bolster your case. Additionally, it’s helpful to point out that some of the organization’s strategic goals may be unattainable without addressing these critical skill gaps.
Create a Detailed Program Proposal
To increase the likelihood of securing funding, develop a comprehensive program proposal. This should include the program’s objectives, expected costs, anticipated outcomes, and how it will improve your quality team’s productivity and performance.
5. Use Data and Analytics
After securing funding and implementing your workforce development program, you must track its progress and measure its success. This will ensure it effectively prepares your team to meet safety and quality objectives as well as identify areas of the program that need improvement.
You can track your program’s progress and success using the following qualitative and quantitative data and analytics.
Quantitative data can include the following:
# of training sessions held
Attendance rates
# of participants
Pre- and post-training assessments
# of courses completed
# of certifications obtained
Changes in safety and quality outcomes.
Qualitative data can include the following:
Feedback from trainers and participants
Observations of team interactions and behavior
Interviews with managers and participants
Case studies of successful application of workforce development initiatives
Good data analytics will help you identify areas needing improvement and uncover best practices that can be applied to future development programs. It’s also crucial to use this data to tailor the program further, ensuring it aligns with your organization’s evolving needs.
Moving Forward with the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework
NAHQ states in its report that it “strongly believes that the quality and safety competencies for the quality workforce have been misunderstood and neglected for too long.”
Healthcare quality and patient safety professionals face a challenging, high-stakes environment. By utilizing the Healthcare Quality Competency Framework, you can clearly define the key competency areas that need attention in your facility. This framework can serve as a valuable guide in developing a structured plan to close the skill gap and ensure your teams are prepared to meet evolving quality and safety goals.
