Valerie Pracilio, MPH
Project Manager for Quality Improvement
Jefferson School of Population Health
There is a "gigantic challenge between the scale of the emergency and the scale of the response" said Bono at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2006. While he was referring to the AIDS epidemic, the same can be said for health care. This weekend, close to 50 students joined together on Jefferson's campus for the 3rd Annual Patient Safety and Quality Leadership Institute to learn how to be leaders in improving our healthcare system and address the emergency. In the time we spent talking about these issues this past weekend, nearly 300 lives were lost to medical errors (11lives/hour), as Dr. Nash mentioned in the previous post. How can this be acceptable in a system that is intended to help them?
Medical, nursing and pharmacy students came together this weekend, making the Institute interdisciplinary for the first time in its three-year history. This accomplishment was the result of collaboration between the program co-sponsors, the Jefferson School of Population Health (JSPH), the American Medical Student Association (AMSA) and the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI). All three of these groups are working to improve the system, but we still have a long way to go.
As an IHI Open School Chapter leader, I hear about these challenges all the time, but we have to be sure to celebrate that there are a lot of great people working to fix the issues. Students have limited opportunities, at best, to learn about quality and safety in the classroom. Their voluntary participation this weekend is an indication that they already recognize safety and quality is part of their responsibility. As Donald Berwick, former CEO of the IHI, says, “the structure of the health-care system encourages good people to make harmful medical errors.”
The challenge facing the students was how to take what they learned back to their school/institution and educate others, in essence becoming advocates for improvement. We have a dual role as clinicians and leaders. The majority of current healthcare professionals don't understand this and future healthcare professionals need to be taught. The weekend started with a group of students interested in learning about quality and safety, but it concluded with a network of improvement leaders energized to create change. There is no doubt that the leaders developed this weekend will advance the improvement movement.