Continuous quality improvement (CQI) in public health organizations is a structured organizational infrastructure and culture for involving staff in planning and executing a continuous flow of improvements to provide quality that meets or exceeds the expectations of communities. Accreditation programs now require that organizations have structures and processes that promote safety and quality, and also that they are functioning effectively. These requirements represent a philosophical shift from quality assurance to continuous quality improvement. The former is regarded as a program that strives to improve quality through defining and measuring it. The latter incorporates both retrospective and prospective assessments, and is aimed at developing strategies to make things better and to create systems to prevent errors.

The Deming Cycle, widely recognized for its effectiveness in driving continuous improvement in various industries, provides a structured approach to process optimization. By systematically progressing through the stages of planning, doing, checking, and acting, the Deming Cycle enables the identification and resolution of areas for improvement. It involves identifying problems, testing solutions, seeing how they work, and making standard improvements. The cycle begins with the planning stage, where areas of opportunity are identified through a thorough analysis of the situation. Then the task is completed and analyzed to see if there is room for improvement. Valuable lessons are drawn from each situation and documented. Learned information is applied to ensure same errors are not repeated.

Johnson, J. K., & Sollecito, W. A. (2020). McLaughlin and Kaluzny’s continuous quality improvement in health care (5th ed.). Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Flores, H. F., Blácido, I. R., Ramos Cevallos, M. P., Penadillo, N. H., & Villarroel Nuñez, L. M. (2025). Enhancing Competency-Based Learning with Neutrosophic Regression and the Deming Cycle. Neutrosophic Sets & Systems, 80, 584–596.