Interprofessional education and practice guide: interprofessional team writing to promote dissemination of interprofessional education scholarship and products.

Collaborations to develop, implement, evaluate, replicate, and write about interprofessional education (IPE) activities within and across institutions are wonderful opportunities to experience teamwork, team communication, ethics and values, and the roles and responsibilities of interprofessional team writing. Just as effective communication in interprofessional team-based care is essential for providing safe, high-quality health care, similar communication strategies are necessary to produce high-quality scholarship of IPE curricula and activities. Relationship and communication issues that affect health care teams' abilities to work together effectively (e.g., hierarchy, exclusion, assumptions, non-responsiveness, biases, stereotypes and poor hand-offs of information) can also occur in interprofessional team writing. Between 1970 and 2010, interprofessional practice research publications increased by 2293%. Although there has been tremendous growth in the IPE literature, especially of articles that require collaborative writing, there have not been any papers addressing the challenges of interprofessional team writing. As more teams collaborate to develop IPE, there is a need to establish principles and strategies for effective interprofessional team writing. In this education and practice guide, a cross-institutional team of faculty, staff, and graduate students who have collaborated on externally funded IPE grants, conferences, products, and workshops will share lessons learned for successfully collaborating in interprofessional team writing.

The second victim of adverse health care events.

Nurses and other professionals drawn to health care by their desire to help others may be traumatized because they are involved in situations that bring harm rather than healing to patients. Health systems should develop early warning systems to alert unit or team leaders when health workers are at risk of harm from adverse events. This article focuses on health professionals who become second victims of adverse events that occur to patients.

Caring for our own: deploying a systemwide second victim rapid response team.

A unique rapid response system was designed to provide social, psychological, emotional, and professional support for health care providers who are "second victims"--traumatized as a result of their involvement in an unanticipated adverse event, medical error, or patient-related injury.

Transfer of care communication: improving communication during inter-facility patient transfer.

Patient care during inter-facility transfer depends not only on the expertise provided by the receiving facility, but also on timely and accurate patient information received from the transferring institution. Our prospective study quantified compliance with inter-facility transfer communication and revealed an opportunity for improvement. Introduction of a simple written template to enhance communication between providers improved the quality of transfer information.

Linking health professional learners and health care workers on action-based improvement teams.

BACKGROUND AND METHODS: Medical students, nursing students, and other health care professionals in training were integrated with health care workers on interprofessional quality improvement (QI) teams at our academic health center. Teams received training in QI, accompanied by expert QI mentoring, with dual goals of increasing expertise in improvement while improving care. RESULTS: Eighty-six learners and health system workers participated in 12 improvement teams in 2 years. Upon completion of the training, participants expressed that the program enhanced QI and teamwork skills and increased understanding of other health care professions. At the end of the program, fourth-year medical students showed greater ability to apply QI skills, as measured by the QI Knowledge Assessment Tool than did control students who did not participate in the program (P < .0001 in 2006-2007 and P < .0005 in 2007-2008). Many teams were successful in improving care processes. CONCLUSION: The design of "learning QI by doing," accompanied by just-in-time training and ongoing expert mentoring in QI, was identified by faculty as the most important factor contributing to success. This model successfully improved application of QI skills by learners while improving care within our academic health center. Testing of the model at other academic health centers and in other training environments is warranted.

Uncovering differences among health professions trainees exposed to an interprofessional patient safety curriculum.

In response to the Institute of Medicine challenge to improve patient safety and quality of care, an office directing patient safety/quality of care at an academic medical center and faculty from health professions schools collaborated on design, delivery, and evaluation of an interprofessional student curriculum on patient safety, quality, and teamwork. Annually for 6 years, second-year medical students, senior baccalaureate nursing students, second-year masters in health administration students, and junior baccalaureate respiratory therapy students participated. A pre-/postsurvey assessing students' attitudes about quality, safety, and teamwork was developed and modified to reflect course revisions. Survey items were grouped into 1 of the 6 subscales: human fallibility, disclosure, teamwork/communication, error reporting, systems of care, and curricular time spent with other professionals. At pretest, there were significant professional group differences in all the 6 subscales. At completion, differences in 4 subscales were resolved with the exception of human fallibility (P < .001) and curricular time spent together (P < .001). Interprofessional exercises within our curriculum mediated most differences among student groups. As more interprofessional curricular experiences are designed, examining baseline group differences is essential to optimize learning outcomes.

Quality and nursing: moving from a concept to a core competency.

The growing focus on providing high-quality care suggests that nurses' involvement in quality activities is likely to increase in coming years. By actively participating in the improvement of health care, nurses benefit their patients and stimulate joy in work.

Brief hospital quality improvement program: preventing venous thromboembolism.

Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a frequent but potentially preventable complication in the hospitalized patient. Solid medical evidence exists about pharmacological and other techniques of effective prevention. As part of a University Hospital quality improvement (QI) program, the Department of Familyand Community Medicine (FCM) increased the rate of prevention from 25 percent to more than 90 percent of eligible patients in just eight months. This overview describes the steps taken in this project to achieve rapid results using accepted QI methodology to reduce VTE.