Improvement Tools

These cards can be used with cognitively impaired non-verbal adults. This card is available in 0 to 5 and 0 to 10 versions and uses the FLACC Scale for assessment of pain in adults with cognitive, behavioral or communication deficits. (Source: New Mexico Medical Review Association)  — View Improvement Tool

This toolkit helps health care organizations assess the effectiveness of their communication with patients, focusing on common problems such as cultural, language, and health literacy gaps. It provides a comprehensive evaluation, with surveys of patients, clinicians, non-clinical staff, and leadership as well as an organizational checklist. (Source: American Medical Association's Ethical Force Program)  — View Improvement Tool

This self-assessment tool enables organizations to understand the range and breadth of elements under patient- and family-centered care and to assess where they are against the leading edge of practice. (Source: Institute for Healthcare Improvement and National Initiative for Children's Healthcare Quality)  — View Improvement Tool

A DVD, "Putting Quality into Practice: Physicians in Their Own Voices," features the perspectives of physicians who have adopted quality measurement and improvement tools. The doctors speak candidly about why they decided to measure their performance, and how the information empowered them to improve the care they provide to patients. (Source: The Commonwealth Fund)  — View Improvement Tool

These in-depth self-assessment inventories provide detailed questions for interdisciplinary patient / family teams in hospitals and outpatient settings. They provide a way to assess patient- and family-centered care in a hospital, clinical area, or practice, and to develop a plan to advance the practice of patient- and family-centered care. (Source: Institute for Family-Centered Care)  — View Improvement Tool

The toolkit contains downloadable resources, including a teaching video, video discussion guide, resource guide, and hospital self-assessment tool, to help hospitals become more patient- and family-focused in their care practices. (Source: American Hospital Association and Institute for Family-Centered Care)  — View Improvement Tool

This resource includes a video describing core concepts of patient- and family-centered care; a video discussion guide; a resource guide on how to advance such care within organizations, and a Hospital Self-Assessment Tool to evaluate the progress hospitals have made and identify opportunities for improvement. (Source: American Hospital Association and Institute for Family-Centered Care)  — View Improvement Tool

This free video was created to help health care organizations determine the best ways to meet the needs of patients with limited English proficiency, low health literacy, or other special communication needs. It identifies tools to build language access programs, explains federal civil rights standards and Joint Commission standards for effective communication and language access, and describes the obligations of health care organizations with respect to the translation of written documents. (Source: Joint Commission and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights )  — View Improvement Tool