Student-led interprofessional workshop for patient safety and quality improvement

Dear Sir

Patient safety and quality improvement (PSQI) are becoming increasingly important in modern healthcare. However, PSQI is not well integrated into the medical school curriculum and there is little opportunity in their training for students to engage in PSQI projects with the multidisciplinary team.

The Institute of Healthcare Improvement (IHI) Open School is a global network of student-led interprofessional societies aiming to educate students in PSQI (Pracilio 2009). This organisation facilitates students in running their own PSQI projects, who in turn, can directly engage in the multidisciplinary team, motivate peer group collaboration and gain leadership experience.

In February 2011, our IHI Open School University of Cambridge Chapter organised a student-led PSQI interprofessional workshop that aimed to motivate a culture of student-led proactive change, educate peers in PSQI principles and equip them with the skills to run their own PSQI projects.

This two-hour workshop comprised an introduction of PSQI principles, filmed reconstructions of adverse clinical incidents followed by interactive discussion in which participants identified areas where patient safety was compromised, small group discussion to brainstorm ideas for improvement projects and their implementation using the Plan, Do, Study, Act (PDSA) cycle (Cleghorn & Headrick 1996) and finally, presentations from each group to feedback on their respective improvement projects.

Healthcare attendees consisted of 30 medical students, five allied health professional students and one public health student. The questionnaires were completed at online registration before the workshop, at the end of the workshop and six weeks after the workshop, enabling measurement of the impact on their knowledge and interest in PSQI.

Both immediately and six weeks after the workshop, students’ subjective assessment of their familiarity with PSQI concepts increased (p < 0.001). Students’ confidence in their skills to conduct PSQI projects significantly increased six weeks post workshop (p = 0.04). Objective measurement of PSQI knowledge showed an improvement immediately after the workshop (p < 0.001) which was sustained following a six-week interval (p = 0.045).

These improvements show that a student-led PSQI workshop can increase the confidence and knowledge of the participating students. We propose that this workshop programme, with a novel combination of student-led teaching techniques, could serve as a framework for use in multiprofessional PSQI training, thus filling a gap in the healthcare student curriculum.

Hannah Zhu†, Preety Das†, Ivan Wong, Xinyi Du, Kaye Prosser, Vishal Vyas, University of Cambridge School of Clinical Medicine, Addenbrooke's Hospital, Box 111 Hills Road, Cambridge CB2 OSP, UK, †Co-first authors