Quality Improvement Tool

The Quality Improvement Tools © have been devised by the Infection Prevention Society, with input and support from a number of individuals and organisations, and The Society is very grateful for the work of all those involved in developing, testing, and finalising this work. These tools can be used by all health and social care workers, within their practice settings to enable the quality of care to be improved in a variety of settings.

An overview and introduction to the tools

These are tools designed for detailed measurement of all aspects of practice/environment. It is envisaged that these tools will be used to measure baseline compliance with standards and identify areas for improvement work. Guidance is provided against the criteria in each standard to help the person using the tool to assess practice objectively. In care settings where there is a specialist Infection Prevention and Control Team, these tools may be used by the team but the guidance will allow use by others who may not have specialist knowledge, such as matrons, ward managers, home managers and link practitioners. The tools are very detailed and therefore it is not advised that all are used simultaneously.

Once a base line assessment has been made on an area of practice/environment, the decision may be taken to use the PIT infrequently, for instance annually, but the frequency of use is for local determination. It is important that where improvement is required, that plans are made to achieve improvement, that realistic time frames are set for achieving improvement, and that regular assessment is made to determine whether improvement work is successful. Such improvement work may be undertaken using quality improvement tools and techniques such as the PDSA cycle.  It may be that only a specific section of the PIT is used depending on where improvement is required, or that more frequent measurement in this context is more practical with a shorter improvement tool designed for this purpose, known as a Rapid Improvement Tool.

Rapid Improvement Tool (RIT)

Rapid improvement tools (RIT) are designed to be used on a frequent basis by all health and social care workers to identify areas for improvement and to assess whether changes planned have been implemented successfully to achieve improvement. It is recommended that if practice is persistently poor as measured by the RIT, despite improvement efforts, that a more detailed assessment using the PIT is undertaken.