Key Strategies to Publishing Your Quality Improvement Work.

Background: Improving quality and safety is a goal in health care, and sharing quality improvement (QI) work with internal and external audiences is key to spreading knowledge and ideas for change. Peer-reviewed journals are interested in manuscripts reporting QI work.

Methodology: Although QI work is methodologically different from traditionally published research articles, it can be publishable if conducted in a way that is scholarly and well-planned.

Systems and Complexity Thinking to Master Leadership Challenges in Interprofessional Health Professionals Education.

The purpose of this article is to propose that knowledge, understanding, and application of systems and complexity thinking can improve assessment, implementation, and evaluation of interprofessional education (IPE). Using a case story, the authors describe and explain a meta-model of systems and complexity thinking to support leaders in implementing and evaluating IPE initiatives. The meta-model incorporates the use of several important, interrelated frameworks that tackle issues of sense making, systems, and complexity thinking as well as polarity management at different levels of scale in an organization.

From Theory to Practice: The Enacted Curriculum of a Successful Master's Program in Quality Improvement and Leadership.

Introduction: Blended learning has taken on new prominence in the fields of higher and continuing education, especially as programs have shifted in response to teaching in a global pandemic. The faculty at the Jönköping Academy's Masters in Quality Improvement and Leadership program has been offering a blended learning curriculum, based on four core design principles, since 2009. We studied key features of the enacted curriculum to understand conditions that can support an effective blended learning model.

Practical strategies to enhance resident engagement in clinical quality improvement.

Background: Engaging residents in meaningful quality improvement (QI) is difficult. Challenges include competing demands, didactics which lack connection to meaningful work, suboptimal experiential learning, unclear accountability, absence of timely and relevant data, and lack of faculty coaches and role models. Various strategies to address these challenges for engagement have been described, but not as a unified approach.

Faking at work, struggling to be healthy at home: A model of surface acting and its relation with unhealthy eating and physical activity.

Performing emotional labor impairs mood as well as regulatory control of employees, and we compare these mechanisms to explain critical health-related behaviors: eating and exercise. Two studies examine the relationship of surface acting at work with unhealthy eating and physical activity at home as mediated by negative and positive affect. Emotion regulation (ER) self-efficacy is tested as a moderator of the indirect relationships.

Application of continuous quality improvement to medical education.

Context: The explicit, intentional and systematic application of continuous quality improvement (QI) in medical education practice and research can improve medical education and help it achieve its goals. Quality improvement and medical education share a foundation centred on learning-experiencing, reflecting, thinking and acting in continuous cycles that spiral to sustained advancement. This suggests that a QI mindset can be brought to bear on various aspects of medical education research and practice.

Building the Bridge to Quality: An Urgent Call to Integrate Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Education With Clinical Care.

Current models of quality improvement and patient safety (QIPS) education are not fully integrated with clinical care delivery, representing a major impediment toward achieving widespread QIPS competency among health professions learners and practitioners. The Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada organized a 2-day consensus conference in Niagara Falls, Ontario, Canada, called Building the Bridge to Quality, in September 2016. Its goal was to convene an international group of educational and health system leaders, educators, frontline clinicians, learners, and patients to engage in a consensus-building process and generate a list of actionable strategies that individuals and organizations can use to better integrate QIPS education with clinical care.

Exemplary Learning Environments for the Health Professions: A Vision.

In this article, the authors propose a vision for exemplary learning environments in which everyone involved in health professions education and health care collaborates toward optimal health for individuals, populations, and communities. Learning environments in the health professions can be conceptualized as complex adaptive systems, defined as a collection of individual agents whose actions are interconnected and follow a set of shared "simple rules." Using principles from complex adaptive systems as a guiding framework for the proposed vision, the authors postulate that exemplary learning environments will follow four such simple rules: Health care and health professions education share a goal of improving health for individuals, populations, and communities; in exemplary learning environments, learning is work and work is learning; exemplary learning environments recognize that collaboration with integration of diverse perspectives is essential for success; and the organizations and agents in the learning environments learn about themselves and the greater system they are part of in order to achieve continuous improvement and innovation.

Daily micro-breaks and job performance: General work engagement as a cross-level moderator.

Despite the growing research on work recovery and its well-being outcomes, surprisingly little attention has been paid to at-work recovery and its job performance outcomes. The current study extends the work recovery literature by examining day-level relationships between prototypical microbreaks and job performance as mediated by state positive affect. Furthermore, general work engagement is tested as a cross-level moderator weakening the indirect effects of microbreaks on job performance via positive affect.

A Plate Waste Evaluation of the Farm to School Program.

Objective: To investigate the impacts of the Farm to School (FTS) Program on the selection and consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Design: Plate waste data were recorded using the visual inspection method before and after implementation of the program.

Setting: Six elementary schools in Florida: 3 treatment and 3 control schools.

Exemplary Care and Learning Sites: A Model for Achieving Continual Improvement in Care and Learning in the Clinical Setting.

Problem: Current models of health care quality improvement do not explicitly describe the role of health professions education. The authors propose the Exemplary Care and Learning Site (ECLS) model as an approach to achieving continual improvement in care and learning in the clinical setting.

Approach: From 2008-2012, an iterative, interactive process was used to develop the ECLS model and its core elements--patients and families informing process changes; trainees engaging both in care and the improvement of care; leaders knowing, valuing, and practicing improvement; data transforming into useful information; and health professionals competently engaging both in care improvement and teaching about care improvement.

The Quality Improvement Knowledge Application Tool Revised (QIKAT-R).

Purpose: Quality improvement (QI) has been part of medical education for over a decade. Assessment of QI learning remains challenging. The Quality Improvement Knowledge Application Tool (QIKAT), developed a decade ago, is widely used despite its subjective nature and inconsistent reliability.

Aligning academic continuing medical education with quality improvement: a model for the 21st century.

The recent health care quality improvement (QI) movement has called for significant changes to the way that health care is delivered and taught in academic medical centers (AMCs). This movement also has affected academic continuing medical education (CME). In January 2011, to better align the CME and QI efforts of AMCs, the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) launched a pilot initiative called Aligning and Educating for Quality (ae4Q).

Adults in all body mass index categories underestimate daily energy requirements.

Objective: To compare the difference between self-reported and calculated daily energy requirements of adults within different body mass index (BMI) categories.

Methods: Adults (n = 978) self-reported daily energy requirements, demographic information, and height, weight, age, and physical activity level (PAL) to calculate total energy expenditure.

Results: The main effects of BMI, gender, PAL, and dieting status on the difference between self-reported and calculated energy requirements for weight maintenance were significant (P < .

Results of an effort to integrate quality and safety into medical and nursing school curricula and foster joint learning.

Improvements in health care are slow, in part because doctors and nurses lack skills in quality improvement, patient safety, and interprofessional teamwork. This article reports on the Retooling for Quality and Safety initiative of the Josiah Macy Jr. Foundation and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, which sought to integrate improvement and patient safety into medical and nursing school curricula.

Expanding educators' medical curriculum tool chest: minute papers as an underutilized option for obtaining immediate feedback.

Background: One barrier to systematically assessing feedback about the content or format of teaching conferences in graduate medical education is the time needed to collect and analyze feedback data. Minute papers, brief surveys designed to obtain feedback in a concise format, have the potential to fill this gap.

Objectives: To assess whether minute papers were a feasible tool for obtaining immediate feedback on resident conferences and to use minute papers, with one added question, to assess the usefulness of changing the format of resident morning report.

Designing education to improve care.

Background: Educators in all health care disciplines are increasingly aware of the importance and value of teaching improvement as an integral part of health professional development. Although faculty and learners can often identify needed changes in the clinical setting, many educators are not sure how to teach the improvement principles and methods needed to achieve and sustain those changes.

Defining And Developing Competency In Qi: Five developmental levels apply to physicians, nurses, and other members of an interprofessional quality improvement (QI) team: novice, advanced beginner, competent, proficient, and expert.

How an educational improvement project improved the summative evaluation of medical students.

Background: At the University of Missouri-Columbia School of Medicine (USA) "commitment to improving quality and safety in healthcare" is one of eight key characteristics set as goals for our graduates. As educators, commitment to continuous improvement in the educational experience has been modelled through improvement of the Medical Student Performance Evaluation (MSPE) letter (formerly the Dean's letter).

Discussion: This educational improvement project decreased waste, increased collaboration and developed locally useful knowledge.

An educational improvement project to track patient encounters: toward a more complete understanding of third-year medical students' experiences.

Background: At the University of Missouri School of Medicine (MUSOM), "commitment to improving quality and safety in healthcare" is one of eight key characteristics set as goals for our graduates. As educators, we have modelled our commitment to continuous improvement in the educational experiences through the creation of a method to monitor and analyse patient encounters in the third year of medical school. This educational improvement project allowed course directors to (1) confirm adequate clinical exposure, (2) obtain prompt information on student experiences, (3) adjust individual student rotations to meet requirements and (4) ascertain the range of clinical experiences available to students.

Linking health professional learners and health care workers on action-based improvement teams.

Background And Methods: Medical students, nursing students, and other health care professionals in training were integrated with health care workers on interprofessional quality improvement (QI) teams at our academic health center. Teams received training in QI, accompanied by expert QI mentoring, with dual goals of increasing expertise in improvement while improving care.

Results: Eighty-six learners and health system workers participated in 12 improvement teams in 2 years.