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February 12, 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.
What’s the difference between a run chart and a control chart? How do you know which improvement tool is right for your project? IHI’s Director of Process Improvement, Bob Lloyd, provides an introduction to control charts in two new whiteboard videos on the IHI Open School website. While you’re there, check out the other whiteboard videos on improvement tools, including the Model for Improvement, PDSA cycles, and flow charts.
Decades of research on health care disparities continue to point out how entrenched the problems are and how often even the most well-intentioned efforts miss the mark. However, we’re also now learning that where health care equity across race and ethnicity has improved, strategies have been truly pressure-tested and are multi-faceted. What are some of these strategies, and what kinds of fresh thinking underpin them? Join the next WIHI on February 13 at 2 PM ET to hear about progress some organizations are making to reduce health disparities.
In our newest Open School course, PFC 103: Having the Conversation: Basic Skills for Conversations about End-of-Life Care, which we’ll release later this month, we talk about “good” deaths and “hard” deaths. What do we mean by a “good” death? IHI director Kelly McCutcheon Adams shares a touching example in her story “The Couple Next Door,” recently featured in Pulse. “As I have reflected on this death and this intimacy,” she writes, “I have imagined that this is what it used to be like with neighbors—present for one another in birth and in death.” Read her full article here, and stay tuned for upcoming details about our new course.
The Annual International Summit on Improving Patient Care in the Office Practice and the Community, taking place in Washington, DC on March 9–11, brings together revolutionary thinkers and innovative practitioners to learn the latest methods and tools for improving care delivery and coordination across the continuum, and engaging individuals and their communities to improve care, promote health, and lower costs. Scholarship funding is available to allow students, faculty, and residents to attend this event at a significantly discounted rate. The deadline to apply for a scholarship is Friday, February 14.
The 1000 Lives Plus Student and Educator Community Open School Chapter in Wales recently announced Clare Woodcock, Anitha Uddin, and Helen Price as winners of the Students Transforming Patient Care competition.The three students won a trip to attend the International Forum on Quality and Safety in Healthcare in Paris, France on April 8–11.
The winning projects were varied, and included: increasing the number of patients accepting cardiac rehabilitation from 50 to 95 percent, improving the cleanliness of toilet facilities to reduce the opportunities for infection transmission, and promoting education on the misuse of continence aids to improve patient experience. “I am passionate about quality improvement,” said Price, a nursing student from the University of South Wales, “and believe in the difference we can make to patients and staff with small steps of change.”
