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Reporting directly to the Chair of the Department of Family Medicine, the QI Project Director will be mandated to develop a proposal for the Department’s Quality Improvement Program that will be presented to the Chair and the Executive Committee for input and approval. Dr. Neb Kovacina, who is a clinician teacher at St. Mary’s, will receive the support and collaboration of Dr. Isabelle Vedel (quality/practice improvement experience) and Dr. Tibor Schuster (EMR data base analysis). Welcome to the team!

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Message from Dr Kovacina:

Montreal, July 7th 2017

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Dear colleagues,

It is with great enthusiasm that I accepted the position of Quality Improvement project leader. My role is to prepare a proposal for QI program that responds to the needs of our GMF-Us, and to recommend an implementation plan by May 2018, the latest. For those of you who do not know me, I am family physician at GMF-U St Mary’s since 2009 and I recently completed master’s program in health administration at University of Toronto.

The ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ department of family medicine identified QI as one of the strategic goals, and wants to provide a framework to support GMF-Us and its clinicians to identify the area for need of improvement, access valid data and significant feedback, understand the feedback and have a productive reflection, and make an action plan and follow-up on the results of change. Also, the new Cadre de gestion des GMF-U requires the hiring of AACQ (Agent de l’Amélioration Continue de Qualité) in each GMF-U, whose exact role is still to be defined. These additional resources can enhance local GMF-U initiatives and provide the support that is needed, especially in data collection and feedback. The department plans to help the GMF-Us with functional integration of AACQ.

For individual clinicians, the feedback from QI activities can be used for guiding each one’s planning in continuing professional development and determining personal improvement objectives. The goal of the QI program will be to facilitate this reflection and provide tools to engage with received feedback to improve one’s practice, in a formative and non-judgmental way. The residents could be involved through their clinical work and at different steps through scholarly projects and research activities.

For QI to become part of the culture, clinicians, administrative staff, and patients should all be at the core of planning. Therefore, one of our first steps this Fall will be to consult all interested parties in seven ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ GMF-Us and incorporate their feedback in the QI planning. Your contribution will be crucial.

I am sure that most of you have already been involved in some way in improving a specific process or pathway of care, to get better patients’ outcomes or experience. By having a solid QI framework and support of department, you will be able to easily access necessary tools to make these changes possible and sustainable. As clinical teaching sites, our GMF-Us must aim to become centers of high quality in patient care, and I will be working on making it easier for you to achieve this goal.

Sincerely,

Neb Kovacina

MDCM CCFP MHSc CHE

Family Physician, St Mary’s Hospital

QI Project Leader, Department of Family Medicine, ÎÛÎÛ²ÝÝ®ÊÓƵ University