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IHI Open School
July 23, 2014
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.
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Making the I-CAN Pledge at the Student Quality Leadership Academy

SQLA_group_shot“Is this what you were expecting?” asked Kate Hilton, JD, MTS, after she explained the Open School’s I-CAN campaign at the 2014 Student Quality Leadership Academy. “It’s better,” an audience member responded, with others shouting their agreement.

Among the inspiring words, images, and moments (Check out many of them here, on Storify!) that presenters Dr. Don Berwick, Dr. Neel Shah, Kate Hilton, and others provided at last week’s leadership event, we found nothing more moving than you, our Open School students. To all 80 of you who journeyed to Cambridge, MA, to attend the Leadership Academy and make the I-CAN Pledge in person, we can’t thank you enough.

So what exactly is I-CAN? In addition to being an acronym for “The IHI Open School Improvement Change Agent Network,” it’s a new campaign to train health professions students to become community organizers and leaders of population health improvement. By joining the campaign, students will:

  • Gain access to a community of like-minded individuals online.
  • Receive training through a special eight-week, semi-synchronous online course that includes one-on-one coaching from IHI faculty.
  • Improve the health and health care of their community.

Ready for the best part? Thanks to a generous grant from the Rx Foundation, even if you missed the Leadership Academy, you can still Pledge and receive the I-CAN training online from the Open School, for free. Click here to learn more and Pledge today.

WIHI: From Prehospital to In-Hospital — The Continuum for Time-Sensitive Care

When it comes to reliability, it’s hard to beat the track record of paramedics and EMTs. Whether it’s speed, knowing what to do in the event of an accident, or the calm and reassuring way emergency responders go about their work, there are plenty of reasons to admire and learn from this group. Could our opinion of EMTs get even higher? Maybe so, now that emergency medical services (EMS) are becoming part of fully integrated health care systems, and paramedics are being trained and equipped to initiate even more life-saving and beneficial treatments in the field. Join us for the next WIHI on Thursday, July 24 at 2 PM EST to look into this evolution.

What We’re Reading: ‘How a Team of Doctors at one Hospital Boosted Hand Washing, Cut Infections and Created a Culture of Safety’

handwashingIn 2008, Dr. Gerald Hickson, Senior Vice President for Quality, Safety, and Risk Prevention at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, didn’t start counting clinical staff members who weren’t washing their hands because he wanted to get them into trouble; he was trying to protect his wife.

Hickson’s wife was recovering from double knee-replacement surgery. While he sat at her hospital bedside, he worried about her risk for acquiring a postoperative infection. As he sat there, he reminded staff members to wash their hands repeatedly, ultimately more than 60 times. 

The story has a happy ending, in that it contributed to the launch of a clean hands initiative at Vanderbilt in 2009, which has since seen tremendous gains in hand hygiene and losses in health care–associated infections. To what does Vanderbilt credit these improvements? Read the full story here. You can also check out more strategies for preventing health care–associated infections through hand hygiene from new guidelines on this topic, released last week.

Community Updates
WelcomeMat Welcome, New Chapters
 
University of Houston – Clear Lake, Texas, USA
Public Health England, England, United Kingdom

AJMQ Calls for Student Abstracts on Improvement

Would you like to publish your improvement project or experience working in an interdisciplinary team? The American Journal of Medical Quality (AJMQ) is calling upon health professions students to submit abstracts for publication in its "Quality Training to Improve Performance (Q-TIP)" column. As a part of the journal’s effort to share student work on performance improvement, AJMQ will select eight abstracts for full article submissions and up to six articles will be published in AJMQ issues in 2015.

Abstracts of no more than 150 words, written by health professions students, describing improvement work and interdisciplinary collaborations should be sent to the faculty advisor, James Pelegano, MD, MS, (james.pelegano@jefferson.edu) by August 20, 2014. Questions regarding "Q-TIP" may also be directed to Dr. Pelegano.

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