Paper
Thursday, July 12, 2007
An evidence-based interprofessional curriculum for quality, safety and systems improvement
Maryjoan D. Ladden, PhD, RN, Department of Ambulatory Care and Prevention, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
| Learning Objective #1: describe the concepts and teaching methods used in the ACT curriculum |
| Learning Objective #2: discuss how to use the ACT curriculum to integrate quality, safety, teamwork and interprofessional collaboration into the curriculum |
The complex and ever changing practice of health care demands that health professionals work together to provide high quality, safe, evidence-based and patient-centered care. Quality, safety and interprofessional collaboration are now universal concepts. However helping learners to develop these key competencies is a challenge. Across the world, educational programs are struggling with how to prepare learners for the real world of practice. Curricula are overcrowded. Faculty may not feel prepared to teach this content.Achieving Competence Today (ACT), a flexible, evidence-based, modular curriculum, was designed to increase graduate nursing and medical learner’s competence in quality, safety and systems improvement; stimulate interprofessional learning and collaboration; and promote the development of faculty prepared to teach this content. ACT is a program of Partnerships for Quality Education (www.pqe.org), a national initiative of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation USA. Over the past two years, ACT has been piloted with over 350 graduate health professional learners in twelve leading US teaching hospitals. Each of the four ACT modules begins with an overview of relevant concepts, background and vocabulary. The learners then complete active learning exercises and develop a plan to improve a quality or safety issue in their practice setting. The structure of the modules involves doing real work, reflecting on it, and receiving feedback.
ACT has been evaluated in two studies. The first study, evaluating the curriculum, found that learner’s knowledge of and self-assessed competence in systems improvement increased after completing the ACT program. The results of the second study, examining ACT’s impact on learner’s attitudes toward interprofessional collaboration and hospital leader’s assessment of the learner’s contributions to quality and safety, are being analyzed. This presentation will demonstrate the curriculum and discuss how it can be used to increase learner’s competence and enhance interprofessional collaboration and faculty development. The curriculum is available on CD-ROM.