What is a PDSA cycle?

• A. Plan-Do-Study-Act; a repeated quality improvement cycle
• B. A cycle for patient data security auditing
• C. A procurement planning cycle
• D. A software development lifecycle

Answer: (A)

PDSA is a four-step, iterative approach for testing and refining changes to improve a process. In Plan, you define the aim, outline the change you want to test, predict what will happen, and lay out the steps and who will do them. In Do, you carry out the plan on a small scale to collect data. In Study, you analyze the results, compare them with your predictions, and determine what the data show about the change’s effect. In Act, you decide whether to adopt the change, adjust it and run another cycle, or abandon it. Because you repeat these cycles, learning builds with each pass and improvements become more reliable. This method is widely used in healthcare quality improvement and nursing informatics to test new workflows, tools, or processes before wider implementation.