Does your court have a FORMAL (written) quality assurance program? If so, I would appreciate receiving any information you could provide, e.g., for what processes; what are your criteria; what data do you collect and analyze; what automated reports, etc. do you use; how do you measure quality? We are a NIBS bankruptcy court.

-- Shannon Kessler (shannon_kessler@ce9.uscourts.gov), October 01, 1999

Answers

Although we are a BANCAP court, the information we are using may be helpful to you. A Quality Assurance Committee was formed several years ago and the project was lead by our DQA. Many hours were spent defining what we wanted the QA Plan to do for us. Before we implemented the Plan, training was provided to the Deputies-In-Charge and to the case managers in our five divisional offices and we asked for feedback. Prior to our QA Plan, our DQA ran certain reports and alerted the DICs to any errors she encountered. The DICs in turn met with the case managers responsible for the error to discuss the problem and correct the errors. The error and the date the error was corrected was entered into our Quality Assurance Database for tracking purposes. The QA Database was also used as a tool to identify areas which may have required additional training. Under the new QA Plan the case managers are responsible for producing reports, and reviewing them for corrective action and to assist them with managing their cases. If an error is discovered the case manager enters it into the Qaulity Assurance Database along with the resolution to the error. The reports are run either in Cron or upon demand according to the schedule listed in the QA Plan. Our court has introduced Peer Evaluations to the case managers and the QA database will assist them with the Peer Appraisals. Our QA Plan resides on our Intranet site - http://156.124.92.245/~txwb. Our QA Plan and BANCAP Style Guide were entered into our Intranet site using RoboHelp.

-- Peggy Craig (peggy_craig@txwb.uscourts.gov), October 07, 1999.