The IHI Open School is an innovative learning community where you can take free online courses, earn certificates, network with peers and experts, and gain confidence and skills in quality improvement and patient safety to change health care. Receive our newsletter from a friend? Click here to sign up.
On August 18, the IHI Open School is launching two big improvements to the IHI Open School courses: a shorter, more streamlined curriculum and a new learning interface. The Basic Certificate in Quality and Safety will now contain 13 courses, instead of 16. Not to worry: No learning will be lost — courses you completed prior to the improvements will still appear in your learning record.Get a sneak peek of the improved courses here. (Questions? Everything you need to navigate the changes is right here.)
Lewis Blackman, a healthy 15-year-old boy, died in 2000 after an elective surgery. Helen Haskell, his mother, now works as an activist against medical error. In this video, Haskell describes the long-term impact of adverse events on patients and families. To learn more, take our course PS 105: Communicating with Patients after Adverse Events.
The number of Americans overdosing from prescribed opioids has quadrupled from 1999 to 2014, but many medical schools devote little time to teaching addiction medicine. NPR reports on how that’s starting to change, now that some reports have fingered doctors’ training for leading to overprescription of opioids and failure to spot and treat addiction. “We're at the very bottom of a very long uphill road,” says Dr. Anna Lembke, director of an addiction medicine fellowship at Stanford. Learn more in the IHI Innovation Report, “Addressing the Opioid Crisis in the United States.”.
Health systems in the United Kingdom are adopting quality improvement and Lean management principles to improve the quality of mental health care, and they’re using the IHI Open School to do it. “Quality improvement is something that is easy to get excited by,” Billy Boland writes about the efforts in the Guardian. “People come into health care to do their best for patients. These new concepts provide a language for people to talk about positive changes and give tools to help us get there.” Learn more about the spread of the IHI Open School courses here and get a sneak peek of our new Basic Certificate curriculum.
