Evidence: Quality Improvement Training

The Health Foundation has released a useful, and I think important, scan of the literature surrounding the strategy, content and process of training others in quality improvement. The document is a comprehensive and well organised summary of their scan of an enormous number of papers.  You can download the 52 page PDF from their website.

What  I liked about this literature scan is their focus on the impact of training. If you are responsible for organising or delivering quality improvement training then I recommend this literature review.

Dissemination Science. OK, that's a useful way of thinking about it.
A framework for training competency in implementation and dissemination science - now that sounds very useful.

Acad Med. 2012 Mar;87(3):271-8.A framework for training health professionals in implementation and dissemination science.Gonzales R, Handley MA, Ackerman S, Oʼsullivan PS.


This is their abstract

"The authors describe a conceptual framework for implementation and dissemination science (IDS) and propose competencies for IDS training. Their framework is designed to facilitate the application of theories and methods from the distinct domains of clinical disciplines (e.g., medicine, public health), population sciences (e.g., biostatistics, epidemiology), and translational disciplines (e.g., social and behavioral sciences, business administration education). They explore three principles that guided the development of their conceptual framework: Behavior change among organizations and/or individuals (providers, patients) is inherent in the translation process; engagement of stakeholder organizations, health care delivery systems, and individuals is imperative to achieve effective translation and sustained improvements; and IDS research is iterative, benefiting from cycles and collaborative, bidirectional relationships. The authors propose seven domains for IDS training-team science, context identification, literature identification and assessment, community engagement, intervention design and research implementation, evaluation of effect of translational activity, behavioral change communication strategies-and define 12 IDS training competencies within these domains. As a model, they describe specific courses introduced at the University of California, San Francisco, which they designed to develop these competencies. The authors encourage other training programs and institutions to use or adapt the design principles, conceptual framework, and proposed competencies to evaluate their current IDS training needs and to support new program development."

WHO Patient Safety Curriculum Guide

More great resources from the World Health Organisation.  To be frank - this curriculum guide is the most comprehensive set of teaching resources on patient safety that I've come across in a decade.  It has been developed by multi-professional groups so avoids the biases that so often occur when courses are developed by a single organisation.  Whilst it's aimed at integrating patient safety into educational curricula, there's no reason why you can't use this within your own organisational setting.

You can access the multi-professional guide here. If you would like the teaching slides for each of the 11 topics then you can download them here, where you will also find background and evaluation information.

And unless I'n missing something - these are free to use - so no there is no excuse in wasting time creating, developing, designing, discussing how to educate and train staff in patient safety. Nor should you be paying anyone to do the creating, designing, developing etc.

Well done WHO!