Interprofessional student teams focus on staff issues while learning about quality improvement

Abstract

There is a well-known gap between what we know and what we do within healthcare service processes. Models that facilitate quality improvement (QI) have seen used to eliminate these gaps. Knowledge and competence in QI work are necessary for every professional within the healthcare system and are ideally learned through interprofessional collaboration and introduced during undergraduate studies. To meet these competence needs, Linköping University, Sweden, in collaboration with the main healthcare provider in the region, implemented a 2-week interprofessional QI learning module, which is mandatory for all undergraduate healthcare students. Ideas for practice-based QI projects were introduced to all the students who studied theory in the relevant domains of QI while working on these projects. A content analysis of students’ written reports was conducted to investigate the focus of the projects. The analysis showed that most projects (65%) concerned staff-related issues, while 35% had patient perspectives. This distribution changed over time, increasing the number of patient centered projects.