Achieving Competence Today (ACT) The 12 week graduate course, “Issues in Health Care, Quality, Cost, Systems and Safety,” is designed to improve patient safety and quality of care. Through a collaborative process guided by a trained facilitator, interdisciplinary teams of physicians, residents, nurses, pharmacists, other health professionals and executives: • Identify practice-based problems • Develop consensus to select a team project • Work together to design and test a solution. As they practice and improve their interdisciplinary team skills, participants learn to investigate and evaluate existing patient care practices and to use research-based evidence to improve them. This year, more than 120 people have taken the class. Since the course began in 2004, teams have developed 20 quality and safety improvement projects, many of which have been integrated into Christiana’s daily operations. One of the projects – “My Tissue, My Result, My Expectation,” which sets out a new OR protocol to reduce error and delay in lab processing and test results – is being integrated into the World Health Organization’s Surgical Safety Checklist, which will be in all ORs by September 2009.
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The program’s momentum is increasing along with the number of graduates who bring their knowledge and the benefits of their ACT experience to our health system. Moving forward, we anticipate that focused educational opportunities like ACT, which involve interdisciplinary professional learning and performance, will become even more familiar in our community teaching hospital setting.
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Brian Little, M.D., Ph.D. Vice President, Academic Affairs and Research
S A F E T Y F I R S T ♦ C R E AT I N G A S A F E C U LT U R E
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