Quality Improvement in Intensive Care Medicine: Leveraging Teamwork to Improve and Optimize Care Delivery

Intensive care medicine involves complex processes and multiple individuals to deliver safe, quality care to patients. Although evidence-based practices are well known, the compliance with such practices is variable, leading to suboptimal results in care delivery. Quality improvement promotes adherence to evidence-based practices by identifying areas of inefficiency in care delivery processes and leveraging teamwork to optimize care delivery and improve overall care outcomes. Background: Intensive care medicine is complex and involves multiple processes in order to effectively deliver the right care in a timely manner to patients. As such, each process must be optimized to deliver care that is consistently compliant with evidence-based practices [1]. However, a gap exists between knowledge of evidence-based practices and actual adherence to and delivery of such care to patients. Without a deliberate means of closing these gaps to ensure quality care delivery, suboptimal results are inevitable. Addressing barriers to compliance and adherence in clinical practice is a must not only to improve outcomes, but to create a standard of quality in the complex intensive care setting.