Development of a Quality Improvement/Patient Safety Curriculum to Increase Emergency Medicine Resident Scholarly Activity

CONTEXT: There currently is no standard method for teaching Quality Improvement/Patient Safety (QIPS) content to prepare resident physicians planning QIPS projects. As part of the 2015-2016 MSU Statewide Campus System Teach for Quality (Te4Q) learner cohort, the first two authors from the McLaren Oakland Hospital Emergency Medicine (EM) residency program developed a structured multi-phase QIPS curriculum. The curriculum was developed to help a cohort of seven second-year EM residents feel more confident to design and conduct their own QIPS projects. METHODS: After institutional review board project approval was obtained, the first two authors evaluated both the pre and post-curriculum confidence survey scores of enrolled EM residents during May, 2016 as part of their Te4Q program participation. RESULTS: Residents completed a 15-item QIPS confidence survey before and after completing the QIPS curriculum. The mean pre-curriculum score was 3.00 (SD 1.53) on a scale from 0 to 10, indicating that the average sample respondent felt a lower level of comfort concerning their ability to design and conduct a prospective QIPS project. The mean post-curriculum confidence score from residents increased to 6.71 (SD 1.25) on a 0 to 10 scale, over double an increase from the pre-workshop score on this item. Using a series of non-parametric Wilcoxon Matched Pairs Signed Rank Test procedures suitable for smaller samples, statistically significant increases in pre- to post-curriculum differences were shown for composite confidence scores (Z = 2.207, p = 0.027), as well as for five of the 12 individual confidence items (p-values ranged from 0.023 to 0.046). CONCLUSIONS: These initial results certainly indicate that a structured ongoing QIPS curriculum may have the potential to improve EM residents’ confidence levels to design and implement QIPS projects with faculty. The impact of these types of curricula for EM and other types of residents needs to be more rigorously examined in more tightly controlled GME settings with larger samples to gauge what types of resident learners will more likely benefit from such educational offerings across the nation.