Innovations at the intersection of academia and practice: facilitating graduate nursing students' learning about...

Quality and safety are high priorities for US hospitals today. This focus is likely to intensify, given the rapidly changing and complex health care environment. While health care organizations are initiating a number of strategies to improve care and respond to changing regulatory and policy requirements, many clinicians practicing in them have not received training on quality and safety as a part of their formal education. We describe an academic-practice partnership formed to educate graduate-level nursing students about health care quality and safety.

Our approach combines theories, methods, and tools of improvement with practice-based learning, thus providing students with an opportunity to apply improvement theories and methods in a health care setting. Student teams are paired with organizational preceptors to conduct projects that address improvement opportunities in health care organizations.

We share the structures-processes-outcomes of our partnership, including the content of our course, development of projects, and how projects are used to facilitate shared student-faculty-organizational learning.

Suggestions are offered that address continued course improvement as well as broader improvements in the education of health professionals about quality and patient safety.