To survive in today's resource restricted healthcare environment, new service programs need a comprehensive quality management plan to document and demonstrate the worth of the program to both patients and the organization's bottom line. Chances are that your new palliative care program will be housed within a department that already has such a plan in place. In this case, you need only review the plan, checking to see that all its parts apply, and, if necessary, customize it for your program. In this chapter, we describe the components of a comprehensive quality management plan that are especially important to ensuring quality of care in palliative care programs. In the Appendix, we present the quality management plan used in the TriCentral Palliative Care (TCPC) Program as well as Kaiser Permanente's "Home Health Quality Management Program Description." Feel free to use these plan descriptions as starting points for developing your own.
Purpose and functions of the plan
Quality Assessment
Performance Improvement
Divisional and Regional Indicators and Indicator Worksheets
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For more information about the TriCentral Palliative Care Toolkit visit www.growthhouse.org/palliative/. All content is Copyright © 2002, 2003 by Richard D. Brumley, M.D. All rights reserved. No part of this toolkit may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the publishers. This guide to developing home-based outpatient palliative care services was developed through a grant to the Kaiser Permanente TriCentral Service Area from The Project on Death In America. The Kaiser Permanente TriCentral Palliative Care Program is a Sustaining Member of the Inter-Institutional Collaborating Network On End-of-life Care (IICN) which links major organizations internationally.
