CPSA Standards of Practice (SOP) Quality Improvement

What is quality improvement based on CPSA’s Standards of Practice?

Being compliant with the Standards of Practice (SOP) involves not only knowing what they are but also critically assessing whether any gaps exist in your practice by selecting metrics from the standards to help you highlight these elements. For a list of the CPSA Standards of Practice, click here.

There are 3 ways to do the Standards of Practice Review:

1. Review one or two of CPSA’s Standards of Practice in depth, reflect on whether your practice is consistent with the expectations in the standards and identify areas for improvement.
2. Complete a self-directed review of your patient records, using CPSA’s new Standards of Practice Metrics tools.  This is quite easy to use and many physicians have stated that doing this QI project improved their practice.  
3. If you’re part of a group practice, strengthen and enhance it through our Group Practice Review program.  This project is done at a clinic level for all physicians. 

For those choosing options 2 or 3, please go to the links above and you will be walked through the process.

For those choosing option 1, please follow the steps below:

Step 1: Review 1-2 CPSA Standards of Practice

• Read a few CPSA Standards of Practice which are relevant to your practice. Examples for family medicine are: Virtual Care, Patient Record Content, Continuity of Care, Prescribing: Drugs Associated with Substance Use Disorder or Substance-Related Harms
• For ER Doctors: consider reviewing: Episodic Care, Transfer of Care or Patient Record Content.
• This is often the step that physicians get stuck on. Please look at the examples of PPIP projects to see if any would be interesting to you.

Step 2: Identify Areas for Improvement

Select an area of the SOP which you can work to improve in your practice.

Step 3: Make an Action Plan Using the CPSA Template 

Consider facilitation with a colleague, clinic staff member, or facilitator from our QI team.

Action Plan Template BLANK

Step 4: Implement Your Action Plan

Implement whatever QI strategy you decided on.

Step 5: Evaluate Your Success 

• Look at your new data to see if the desired outcome was achieved.
• This is usually a chart review to see if you have made the changes you were planning on making.

Step 6: Submit in the PPIP Section of the CPSA Renewal Information Form

This just means that on your annual CPSA review you click “Yes” for the PPIP Objective Quality Improvement project. Don’t panic if you have previously clicked “Yes” and didn’t have it done yet.  Just make sure that you do complete this by Dec 31, 2025.

Credit: Noe, M. (2019) Doc-related: A satirical comic on the challenges of practicing medicine today as seen through the eyes of physicians working in a large health care system, Graphic Medicine. Available at: https://www.graphicmedicine.org/doc-related-blog/ (Accessed: 06 February 2024).