The National Quality Forum is taking definitive steps toward reaching the NQS aims through the work of its action teams—the cornerstone of NQF’s National Quality Partners program, which provides an essential forum for multistakeholder collaboration focused on quality improvement.

NQF’s first two action teams—which addressed reducing avoidable hospital admissions and readmissions, and improving maternity care for mothers and babies, respectively—were established in 2012 to provide a collaborative environment for organizations with clear channels to the delivery system, or levers to influence it, to develop and implement evidence-based interventions in a defined area of practice .

“We’ve seen great success with the action team model, which identified a challenge as well as specific goals, and expects concrete contributions from its members to lead to improvement,” said M. Michael Shabot, M.D., system chief medical officer at Memorial Hermann Health System. “The Maternity Action Team’s work to reduce the rate of early elective deliveries laid the groundwork for establishing hard-stop policies for elective deliveries prior to 39 weeks. These efforts have resulted in a more than 60 percent reduction nationally in such deliveries over the last year.”

In 2014, NQF added a new action team to promote person-centered care through patient and family engagement across the continuum of care.

In 2015, NQF plans to add action teams to tackle antimicrobial stewardship as a critical strategy to address the public health issue of antimicrobial resistance, and to continue the work of the Patient and Family Engagement Action Team’s Patient Passport.

Currently, NQF action teams are funded by the Partnership for Patients in support of their goal of improving patient safety. Learn more.