Improving medication management together: A practical guide to establishing and leading a quality improvement collaborative

Implementing evidence-based recommendations and guidelines into standard practice is often a slow and challenging process. Competing priorities, organisational complexities and a lack of practical ways to apply evidence into practice can make it challenging for healthcare teams to implement best practice in a sustainable way.

One approach that can be used to facilitate translating evidence in practice is a quality improvement collaborative. A quality improvement collaborative uses an evidenced-based approach to bring healthcare professionals together from different sites to learn from each other, use data to track their progress and implement best practice in a measurable and sustainable way.

Monash University and Flinders University have released a new guide on how to establish and lead a quality improvement collaborative. The guide, Improving medication management together: a practical guide to establishing and leading a quality improvement collaborative, is designed to support senior healthcare professionals, managers and leaders across healthcare settings, as well as aged care provider organisations, healthcare professional organisations and primary health networks who may want to implement a quality improvement collaborative.

The guide contains real-word case studies based on experiences from the quality improvement collaborative established in the national trial called, Maximising Embedded Pharmacists in AGed CAre Medication Advisory Committees (MEGA-MAC). The MEGA-MAC trial included healthcare professionals working as knowledge brokers, supported by a national quality improvement collaborative, to implement Australia’s new Guiding Principles for Medication Management in Residential Aged Care Facilities.  The MEGA-MAC quality improvement collaborative brought together pharmacists and nurses working across four states of Australia, and was supported by an expert panel of clinicians, implementation scientists and consumer representatives.

Contact for more information

For more information about the quality improvement collaborative guide or the MEGA-MAC project, please contact Dr Amanda Cross (amanda.cross@monash.edu).

Funding

This guide was developed as part of the MEGA-MAC project. The MEGA-MAC project is funded by the Commonwealth of Australia’s 2022 Medical Research Future Fund (MRFF) Quality, Safety and Effectiveness of Medicine Use by Pharmacists grant (MRFMMIP000025).