Patient Safety
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) – Quality Improvement Toolkit
The AHRQ QI Toolkit is designed to help your hospital understand the Quality Indicators (QIs) from AHRQ and use them to successfully improve quality and patient safety in your hospital. The AHRQ QIs use hospital administrative data to assess the quality of care provided, identify areas of concern in need of further investigation, and monitor progress over time. This toolkit focuses on the 18 Patient Safety Indicators (PSIs) and the 28 Inpatient Quality Indicators (IQIs). The QI Toolkit supports hospitals that want to improve performance on the IQIs and PSIs by guiding them through the process, from the first stage of self-assessment to the final stage of ongoing monitoring. The tools are practical, easy to use, and designed to meet a variety of needs, including those of senior leaders, quality staff, and multistakeholder improvement teams. Created by the RAND Corporation and the University HealthSystem Consortium with funding from AHRQ, it is available for all hospitals to use free of charge.
Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) – Strategies and Tools to Enhance Performance and Patient Safety (TeamSTEPPS®)
The TeamSTEPPS® is an evidence-based teamwork system aimed at optimizing patient care by improving communication and teamwork skills among healthcare professionals, including frontline staff. It includes a comprehensive set of ready-to-use materials and a training curriculum to successfully integrate teamwork principles into a variety of settings.
American College of Surgeon’s (ACS) – National Surgery Quality Improvement Program® (NSQIP)
ACS NSQIP is the leading nationally validated, risk-adjusted, outcomes-based program to measure and improve the quality of surgical care in the private sector. ACS NSQIP has the tools, training, customization options and, most importantly, data, to keep your hospital ahead of the curve.
Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) – Teaching for Quality (Te4Q)
Teaching for Quality (Te4Q) is a faculty development program that trains clinical faculty how to effectively teach quality improvement and patient safety (QI/PS) to medical students, residents, and other clinicians. By training clinical faculty how to integrate QI/PS across the continuum of medical education, Te4Q ensures that QI/PS is a part of medical education from day one. Te4Q was created in response to an identified gap in the education of students, residents, and practicing clinicians in quality improvement and patient safety. Te4Q also supports multiple national academic and clinical priorities for improved patient and health care outcomes, with an emphasis on progressive accreditation requirements (e.g., those of the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education).
Duke University School of Medicine
Online training modules on quality improvement, patient safety, medical errors.
Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) – Open School
The IHI Open School brings you essential training and tools in an online, educational community to help you and your team deliver excellent, safe care. When you engage with the Open School courses and Chapters, you join more than 250,000 learners from universities, organizations, and health systems around the world in building core skills in improvement, safety, and leadership.
Johns Hopkins Medicine – Armstrong Institute for Patient Safety and Quality
The Armstrong Institute’s online Patient Safety Certificate Program delivers core concepts and tools to be an effective patient safety champion in your hospital, clinical department or unit/clinic. The program’s 13 modules, which can be taken anywhere and at any time, delve into core concepts in such areas as:
- Fostering a culture of patient safety
- Delivering patient-centered care
- Designing safer care delivery systems
- Enhancing interdisciplinary teamwork and communication
- Sustaining change
- Tools and strategies for identifying and mitigating hazards.
Patient safety initiatives, both in the United States and overseas, have used this online program to prepare key organizational safety leaders and build their organizations’ internal capacity for improvement.
The Mayo Clinic – Quality Academy
A curriculum focused on disease and the management of disease is no longer adequate for the training of physicians and other healthcare providers who are expected to practice in an environment where medical errors, system shortcomings, and physician/practice scorecards are the norm. Quality improvement and patient safety are critical components of building new paradigms of professional practice in healthcare. With an understanding of the basic concepts and best practices in quality and safety, we hope that healthcare providers can significantly enhance the care they provide and, in turn, improve patient outcomes.
The Mayo Clinic Quality Academy curricular modules cover topics related to quality improvement, quality measurement, patient safety, evidence-based medicine, leadership, and health policy. Some of the content areas are covered through basic and advanced modules; in general, we would recommend that the basic modules are more relevant for an undergraduate/graduate health professions student, while the advanced modules are for those interested in further training in the area and for practicing health professionals.
With the generous support of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation, the Mayo Clinic Quality, and Safety Curriculum Initiative, our team of Mayo Clinic experts is pleased to introduce nine curricular modules and faculty syllabi for eight validated objective structured clinical examination (OSCE) stations. We anticipate that these materials will be useful for a) practicing physicians, b) residents and fellows, c) medical students, and d) allied health students. For educators who wish to track progress in learning, we have included pre- and post-learning questions with each module.