Performance Improvement Priorities From the Perspective of Emergency Department Staff in Iran's Hospitals

The emergency department is the heart of every hospital and regular circulation of tasks in this unit can save countless lives. Quality of services provided at emergency departments is of particular importance and performance improvement is considered as one of the most important processes in emergency departments.
The aim of this study was to determine performance improvement priorities of emergency departments of Iran’s hospitals.
This research was a cross-sectional study. First, a systematic review was conducted and performance improvement priorities of the emergency department were identified and designed as a questionnaire in five areas: communication, teamwork, clinical pathway, patient flow and other factors. During October 2015, after examining the content validity index (CVI) and content validity ratio (CVR), the questionnaires were given to 200 hospital emergency experts (doctors and nurses) across the country. After collecting the questionnaires, the data were entered into the SPSS software and analyzed.
In a comparative investigation of the scores of different areas of performance improvement of emergency department of the country’s hospitals based on Friedman test, from the perspective of the emergency department staff, the average score of these areas was significant (P Priorities set by emergency workers in various areas such as communication, teamwork, clinical pathway and patient flow, play a significant role in the performance improvement of the emergency department.