Enhancing the Patient Experience through Innovative Quality Improvement Education

The “Patient Experience” arm of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement’s Quadruple Aim is defined by the Institute of Medicine (IOM) as quality care that is safe, effective, patient-centered, timely efficient, and equitable. The IOM called for a uniform approach to health professions education utilizing five core competencies to achieve high-quality care. “All health professionals should be educated to deliver patient-centered care as members of an interdisciplinary team, emphasizing evidence-based practice, quality improvement approaches, and informatics.” Physical Therapy educators have expanded curricula to teach three of these five competencies. We routinely teach that physical therapists practice in interprofessional teams to provide care that is patient-centered and evidence-based. However, we lag behind other health professions in teaching quality improvement concepts and skills in entry-level education. This session will discuss how the IOM defines quality in the context of “The Patient Experience,” describe the five IOM competencies for health professions education, identify the gaps in teaching of quality improvement in physical therapy education, and use key frameworks to engage small groups of learner equality improvement curricula and develop new approaches in academic and clinical settings

Gender differences in higher education degree choice

Choosing and enrolling in a higher education degree and, consequently, selecting a profession, is still conditioned by social and cultural factors characterized by gender stereotypes that continue to attract more men to technical and technological careers and more women to teacher training and social work. However, the nature of gender inequities changed over the recent decades, becoming more complex. This complexity can be observed in the men and women’s career preferences. Even considering that vocation influences the choices, the stability that some careers represent, regarding the immediate access to employment and to reasonable salaries also influences the options made by men and women. Besides that, literature has been highlighting that both the students’ self-perception and the perceptions about degrees and social encouragement also influences their choices. This study analyses the perception that higher education students have about themselves and the degrees they have enrolled. More specifically, it analyses the gender stereotypes that persist within themselves and their perception about the assumed affinity between gender and areas and professions. The study follows a quantitative methodology approach, using a questionnaire for data collection. The questionnaire was structured based on reference literature about gender stereotypes, gender differentiation in higher education and the values about professions. Students from 6 degrees in different areas participated in the study (social work, nursing, teacher training, engineering – informatics and mechanics and sports). Data were interpreted through a multivariate analysis with the independent variable gender and degree, to assess the differences in the questionnaire responses. There seems to exist an image of man and woman associated with some degrees and professions. Although all of the students assume a complete freedom of choice for enrolling higher education degrees, the options seem to be determined by social and gender stereotypes and also by professional stability.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Towards an interoperable healthcare information infrastructure - working from the bottom up

Historically, the healthcare system has not made effective use of information technology. On the face of things, it would seem to provide a natural and richly varied domain in which to target benefit from IT solutions. But history shows that it is one of the most difficult domains in which to bring them to fruition. This paper provides an overview of the changing context and information requirements of healthcare that help to explain these characteristics.First and foremost, the disciplines and professions that healthcare encompasses have immense complexity and diversity to deal with, in structuring knowledge about what medicine and healthcare are, how they function, and what differentiates good practice and good performance. The need to maintain macro-economic stability of the health service, faced with this and many other uncertainties, means that management bottom lines predominate over choices and decisions that have to be made within everyday individual patient services. Individual practice and care, the bedrock of healthcare, is, for this and other reasons, more and more subject to professional and managerial control and regulation.One characteristic of organisations shown to be good at making effective use of IT is their capacity to devolve decisions within the organisation to where they can be best made, for the purpose of meeting their customers' needs. IT should, in this context, contribute as an enabler and not as an enforcer of good information services. The information infrastructure must work effectively, both top down and bottom up, to accommodate these countervailing pressures. This issue is explored in the context of infrastructure to support electronic health records.Because of the diverse and changing requirements of the huge healthcare sector, and the need to sustain health records over many decades, standardised systems must concentrate on doing the easier things well and as simply as possible, while accommodating immense diversity of requirements and practice. The manner in which the healthcare information infrastructure can be formulated and implemented to meet useful practical goals is explored, in the context of two case studies of research in CHIME at UCL and their user communities.Healthcare has severe problems both as a provider of information and as a purchaser of information systems. This has an impact on both its customer and its supplier relationships. Healthcare needs to become a better purchaser, more aware and realistic about what technology can and cannot do and where research is needed. Industry needs a greater awareness of the complexity of the healthcare domain, and the subtle ways in which information is part of the basic contract between healthcare professionals and patients, and the trust and understanding that must exist between them. It is an ideal domain for deeper collaboration between academic institutions and industry