Three Questions … A Quick Glimpse Into WHO is Using SQUIRE and WHY - December 2009

Nancy Armistead, MPA is the Executive Director for the Mid-Atlantic Renal Coalition.
Realizing the applicability to their work Nancy and colleagues attended SQUIRE training at IHI last year. Nancy then promoted SQUIRE at a Network training session, one of the Network physicians presented on SQUIRE as a model for development of our QI initiatives. As a result they have submitted a paper for publication using the SQUIRE Guidelines. Here are Nancy's answers to our three questions.

1. What have you found most interesting about SQUIRE?
We appreciate the recognition that research and quality improvement are related but different activities, each with their own merits. We like that SQUIRE provides a framework for the design and reporting of QI projects which allows us to learn from a body of work that was not previously visible.

2. How has SQUIRE helped in writing about your improvement work?
Having a template is helpful in allowing several individuals to effectively work on the write up of a single project and brings consistency to our QI efforts. The framework assures that we're thinking about and addressing all salient components of our project  thereby strengthening the overall project design, implementation and learning from experience.

3. Has SQUIRE influenced how you plan for future work?
One of our challenges is the use of evidence based interventions to guide our quality improvement initiatives. We intend to use SQUIRE in project planning, deployment and final reporting moving forward. Not all projects will result in publication, but we'll have comprehensive end of project reports to share with our review boards and funding agency, Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services. We'll use what we learn to plan new quality improvement initiatives.