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.
When was your last bad meeting? Last week? Yesterday? An hour ago? We’ve all been in meetings that drag on, meetings that don’t seem to have a purpose, and meetings that don’t end with concrete next steps. What’s the solution? In a new IHI Open School Short, Bob Pozen, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School and a senior research fellow at the Brookings Institution, provides clear, simple advice on how to run a good meeting. With help from a vignette (featuring the Open School team!), he also shares the bad behaviors we should all avoid. Watch the video, and take the lead on improving meetings at your organization.
In hospitals, doctors order a lot of blood tests on inpatients — too many, according to the Choosing Wisely campaign. Unnecessary tests can harm patients, such as by causing pain and anemia, and also hurt health systems’ bottom lines. So Matt Cerasale, MD, an Open School learner and resident in the Henry Ford Health System, decided to tackle this issue in his quality improvement elective. “The biggest surprise during the project was understanding how big a simple problem actually was, and how many people it affected,” he says. Read more about his project in a new post on the IHI Open School blog.
Tove Schuster, a nurse at Crozer-Chester Medical Center near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, damaged a disk in her spine while lifting a 300-pound patient who fell on the floor. She’s not alone — data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that nursing staff are injured on the job more than any other profession, including firefighters and police officers. Some hospitals, acting on evidence that there’s no safe way for nurses to move patients manually, have targeted nurse injuries as an area for improvement. But others have been slow to prioritize nurse safety. Read more in NPR’s investigative series on injured nurses.
Community Updates
Welcome, New Chapters
Georgia Regents University, Augusta, Georgia
South East Asia Prehospital Emergency Care College, Australia
University of Ghana College of Health Science, Ghana
Planning an event with your Chapter is hard enough — don’t leave money on the table! Each semester, the Open School offers funds to help Chapters with their events and activities. To be considered for funds for spring events, please share your upcoming activities on this form before the deadline this Friday, March 6. Questions? Check out our new FAQ page.
Calling all health professionals and students in the Toronto, Canada, area with an interest in quality, cost, and value: Join the U of T Open School Chapter and up to 200 colleagues on May 1–2 in downtown Toronto for the fifth annual Quality Improvement and Patient Safety Conference. This year, the conference theme is “efficiency,” and expert speakers will explore how to “do the right thing” with limited resources. Conference attendees will have the opportunity to contribute to the discussion and network with peers and local employers. Learn more and register here.
