The state of quality improvement and patient safety teaching in health professional education in New Zealand
Gillian Robb, Susan Wells, Iwona Stolarek, Gillian Bohm
This study investigated the teaching of healthcare quality and safety in all institutions providing training for medicine, nursing, midwifery, dentistry, pharmacy, physiotherapy, dietetics and 11 other allied health professions in New Zealand. Interviews were undertaken with 43 people who led the teaching programmes. Evidence-based practice, patient-centred care and teamwork and communication were well embedded in programmes, while leadership, systems thinking and the role of IT were less explicitly included. Patient safety teaching was focused mainly around incident reporting, and to a lesser extent learning from adverse events. Except for two institutions, specific application of improvement science was absent from pre-registration curricula. Improvement science is relatively new for healthcare, but as an applied science, it offers a robust approach to addressing real life problems in real life situations. Healthcare training needs to address the identified gaps so that new graduates will be able to improve the quality and safety of healthcare.