Grant: Project Grant

Increasing the impact of successful quality improvement initiatives depends on the context, or work environment, that the initiative is occurring in as well as how the initiative is facilitated. Improving the success of initiatives is vital since these initiatives impact quality of care and life for residents living in long-term care settings. Our proposed project will use various approaches to delve into the complex ways that context and facilitation work together to improve how successful, or not, initiatives are. This research is suited to our team since we have worked with long-term care facilities for over a decade and, over that time, we have collected extensive data on resident and care providers' experiences as well as implemented several of our own improvement initiatives. This allows us to use all the various types of data we have amassed (e.g., interviews, focus groups, observations, and surveys) to develop a deeper understanding of how context and facilitation influence improvement initiatives. There are several important outcomes of this project. First, we will generate new knowledge about how to improve the success of quality improvement initiatives. Second, we will advance existing theories about how quality improvement initiatives work, which will help future initiatives to be more successful. Third, our results can be called upon when generating future improvement initiatives, thus allowing those initiatives to be built upon strong evidence. Fourth, this research will advance the quality and utility of improvement initiatives within complex health care settings, thereby improving the care of residents and work life of care providers.