Evaluation of a QI Module for Psychiatry Residents

Quality improvement (QI) training and experience is increasingly being recognised as a mandatory core area of residency training. This was a QI initiative to develop and evaluate a QI Fundamentals teaching curriculum for psychiatry residents, in an effective and time-efficient manner.

Using principles from the book Teaching QI in Residency Education, we developed and evaluated a workshop for first year psychiatry residents. Educational material on QI methods and tools was emailed to the residents a week prior to the 3.5-h workshop, which entailed a 50-min didactic session followed by two interactive sessions of 60 min each with both small group and large group components.

Effectiveness was assessed using the Self-Assessment Program (SAP), a standardised, validated tool for assessing QI competencies, over 3 consecutive academic year cohorts. The SAP evaluates the trainee's comfort level in 10 domains, regarding their current skills with various aspects of quality improvement. Twenty-three residents completed the pre- and post-SAP. There was a significant improvement in post-SAP versus pre-SAP scores in each of the 3 years in all of the 10 domains.

The results suggest that this interactive QI workshop may be an effective and time-efficient model for imparting fundamental QI education to junior psychiatry residents and may be easily replicated by other programmes in psychiatry or other medical specialties, in particular where there are constraints in terms of time, funding and expertise in QI.