An Integrated, Multimodal Resident Curriculum in Patient Safety and Quality Improvement

Patient safety and quality improvement are essential components of modern medicine. The traditional model of graduate medical education does not lend itself well to learning these disciplines. This curriculum encompasses these disciplines across multiple modalities and extends throughout residency.

The curriculum includes introductory presentations suitable for naive audiences. Following these is a structured rotation that provides the opportunity both to experience in-depth self-directed learning and to practice skills involved in quality and safety. This rotation includes existing online courses published elsewhere, reflective writing exercises based on self-directed learning, and practice cases. Finally, residents lead a morbidity, mortality, and improvement conference where adverse events are identified and reviewed, specific interventions and outcome objectives are selected, and action teams are identified.

After two presentations on system issues and individual issues, responses to the prompt "This talk will aid in my professional development" were 4.75 and 4.59 out of 5, respectively. Eighty-three percent of residents agreed they had a better understanding of the concepts of patient safety and/or quality improvement than they did before the rotation. Audience members for the resident-led morbidity, mortality, and improvement conference agreed it would lead to a change in their own practice.

The contents of this longitudinal curriculum have been incorporated into the core requirements of our general pediatrics residency program and could reasonably be imported into any residency requiring a robust longitudinal experience in quality improvement and patient safety.