The Physics of Healthcare: Performance & Quality Improvement

Welcome! If you’ve ever looked at a crowded nursing unit and thought, "There has to be a better way to do this," you are already thinking like a quality improvement engineer.

In nursing, we don’t just treat patients; we treat systems. A brilliantly skilled nurse working in a broken, disorganized system is going to make mistakes. That is the fundamental premise of this topic. We are looking at how to fix the machine of healthcare so that the humans running it can succeed.

Because this is about the big picture of how care is delivered and measured, the National Council of State Boards of Nursing includes performance improvement under the Management of Care section of the NCLEX-RN test plan. It is a massive, heavily tested area because it quite literally saves lives on a population scale. Let’s dive into how it works.