With growing concern about hospital care quality and attention to the need for improvement
of care, quality improvement (QI) has become an administrative mandate in U.S. hospitals.
Although it is encouraging to see the shift of attention from cost containment alone to
improvement of quality, the current approach to QI has the potential to undermine the
professional values of nursing. In this paper, an implicit gap between QI as ideal nurses’
professional accountability and the reality of current QI activities will be described. Further,
this paper will examine potential threats the current QI approach poses to professional
nursing, and explore possibilities for integrating nursing professional values in QI efforts.