Continuous Quality Improvement

by Keith Wallace

As part of FTIA´s commitment to provide professional quality adoption services with integrity, FTIA undertakes continuous quality improvement steps. These steps include long term planning, short term planning, continuous quality improvement review, and the development of ways to measure the quality of service we are providing.

Currently, FTIA is in its third year of its long term/strategic plan. This long term/strategic plan is partially implemented. FTIA has moved into its own building, which was built and designed solely for FTIA to provide a quality environment that allows the FTIA team to provide higher quality service to our adoptive parents. FTIA added an Associate Director, Doug Regin, two years ago to take on more administrative duties to allow the Executive Director to focus more on improving the quality of the adoption programs. Over the last two to three years, FTIA has added staff and increased the amount of staff training. FTIA has also obtained licenses in the states of Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.

Part of FTIA´s long term/strategic plan remains to be implemented. Some of the areas yet to be accomplished include expansion of FTIA´s post adoption services, expanding humanitarian efforts, and even more staff training.

Short Term CQI Progress. At least annually, FTIA undertakes a short term plan, where our FTIA team identifies a particular area of service that we believe we should focus on improving our quality of service. This area or project is identified by input from our FTIA team, as well our adopting parents. When our adoptive parents complete their adoption, we ask them to return a survey and questionnaire. We review every survey and questionnaire through our staff meetings. We keep records on the results and try to determine if there is an area that has repeatedly been identified by our adopting parents that we need to improve. All of this information goes into our annual plans.

Our current short term plan focuses primarily in the area of improving our custom software to track the enormous amount of information that is required for each adoption. Also, our software helps us stay in regular contact with our families, as well as develop outcome measures that we can use in our ongoing continuous quality improvement procedures.