Abstract
Objectives: To outline overall duties of quality improvement (QI) performers within a health care organization, thus describing their key tasks, including task element-related frequency, importance and difficulty in enough detail. Methods: A DACUM (Developing A CurriculUM) workshop took place to outline overall job activities of QI performers. To examine the scope of their duty and task, we performed a questionnaire survey of 338 QI performers from 111 hospitals. Results: The results of our survey showed that for the task assigned to each QI performer, there were 10 duties, 31 tasks and 119 task elements. Respondents cited a project planning as the most frequent/important duty, and a research was the highest level of difficulty in their duty. They also said that the most frequent task was index management, the most important task was a business plan, and the highest level of difficulty was a practical application of QI research. QI performers added that the most frequent task element was receipt of patient safety reporting in patient safety system, the most important task element was an analysis for patient safety and its improvement, and the highest level of difficulty was a regional influence analysis related to the patient safety and its improvement. Conclusion: To ensure that QI performers play a pivotal role as a manager to better improve patient safety and the quality of health care services, proper training program for them should be developed by reflecting the results of our study.