Twelve tips for creating a longitudinal quality improvement and safety education for early health professions students

Abstract

Despite the numerous calls for integrating quality improvement and patient safety (QIPS) curricula into health professions education, there are limited examples of effective implementation for early learners. Typically, pre-clinical QIPS experiences involve lectures or lessons that are disconnected from the practice of medicine. Consequently, students often prioritize other content they consider more important. As a result, they may enter clinical settings without essential QIPS skills and struggle to incorporate these concepts into their early professional identity formation. In this paper, we present twelve tips aimed at assisting educators in developing QIPS education early in the curricula of health professions students. These tips address various key issues, including aligning incentives, providing longitudinal experiences, incorporating real-world care outcomes, optimizing learning environments, communicating successes, and continually enhancing education and care delivery processes.

Keywords:

• Curriculum
• education environment
• multiprofessional
• outcome-based
• phase of education
• undergraduate
• teaching & learning
• instructional design

Disclosure statement

The authors have no declarations of interest to report.

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

No funding was received for the authorship of this work.

Notes on contributors

S. Anthony Sara

S. Anthony Sara, MS, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.

Anna Schwarz

Anna Schwarz, MS, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.

Michelle I. Knopp

Michelle I. Knopp, MD, Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Department of Pediatrics, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA. Hospital Medicine, Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.

Eric J. Warm

Eric J. Warm, MD, FACP, Department of Internal Medicine, College of Medicine, University of Cincinnati, Cincinnati, Ohio, USA.