Development of the quality improvement collaborative questionnaire (QuIC) to explore quality improvement partnerships to teach pre-registration nursing students.

Background: Quality improvement partnerships between healthcare organisations and higher education require further research to explore their potential to provide a valuable education experience for pre-registration nursing students.

Aims: Develop and validate a questionnaire for nurse academics to evaluate quality improvement content in pre-registration nursing curricula and the extent of partnership with higher education providers in developing this content. Conduct a pilot test of the questionnaire.

Study Design: Use a content validity approach.

Methods: The Australian higher education sector was the setting and participants were nurse academics with knowledge of the quality improvement content taught in pre-registration nursing courses. The quality improvement collaboration (QuIC) questionnaire was informed by the literature and sent to ten quality improvement and higher education experts for content validation. Each question was scored on a Likert scale for relevance and clarity. The QuIC questionnaire was distributed by email to the 37 higher education organisations offering pre-registration programmes in Australia. Descriptive statistics were used to analyse the questionnaire data.

Results: Eight experts completed the content validity questionnaire in full, with the QuIC questionnaire achieving an excellent content validity score of 0.94 for relevance and clarity. The QuIC questionnaire was completed by 24 participants. The results indicated that quality improvement education partnerships are only used occasionally in Australia. The education methods used to teach this content were case studies (online cases n = 11, 46%; patient cases n = 9, 38%) and the development of quality improvement education materials (n = 7, 29%).

Conclusions: The QuIC questionnaire demonstrates excellent relevance and clarity, and is the first in the literature to address the constructs of quality improvement education and partnerships. The pilot results provide insight into quality improvement education methods used in Australia and the presence of partnerships. These results may be used to assist in the implementation of quality improvement education partnerships into curricula across the health professions.