The Quality Life

Earlier this week, the Director of Quality Systems for a small regional hospital was heard to explain to one of her managers, “We don’t need to collect and analyze data for this! We’re a small enough organization that everyone already knows what the problems are!”

To which I would say, “Hogwash!”

A dictum of continuous improvement is that “if you’re not measuring it, you can’t improve it.”  We may not always want to know what the data show, but we certainly can’t make informed decisions based on what “everybody knows.”

Kinda scary, the way some people get to be quality directors…