This course is a part of a series: Essentials for Healthcare Professionals. The course focuses introduces common quality tools in handling everyday problems or challenges in healthcare. The main aim of the series is to form a base of common knowledge for healthcare professionals, apart from their specific role in healthcare. The course is equally important for any healthcare professional and does not assume any previous experience in problem solving skills. It smoothly engages you in a logical flow of how to analyse and find solutions for different challenges you might face in your daily practice. The course starts by shedding light on the most important factor in solving any problem - that is problem definition. Many problems we face do not have a clear description or boundaries to address. This is a main reason for going around problems without effectively solving them. After having a clear definition of a problem, we go through its analysis. Understanding why a problem occurred is, at the first place, the right place to start solving it. After understanding reasons, it comes up to finding innovative solutions or options for our problem. Different methods are used, however, exemplary common tools are explained along with practical exercises. Upon finding different options for solving problem or improving a current process, we need to have a tool help us decided among them. Here comes up the importance of prioritisation matrix in converting our subjective feedback into easily understandable numbers to choose among them.
