How health professions education can advance patient safety and quality improvement

A commonly held belief is that education and training are weak interventions that have limited success on their own in improving system reliability, clinical processes and, ultimately, patient safety and healthcare quality (Caffazzo and St-Cyr 2012). Yet, for emerging fields such as patient safety and quality improvement (PS/QI), one should not underestimate the importance of educating frontline staff in the fundamentals of these disciplines. For most healthcare institutions, there is a major bandwidth problem when it comes to PS/QI work, which acts as a critical barrier to accelerating change and improving patient safety and healthcare quality. Too few people are relied on to solve all of the institution's safety and quality problems.