Background: In 2014, UCLA Health embarked on a journey to train and inspire the future generation of medicine. The Healthcare Improvement & iNnovation in Quality (THINQ) Collaborative aims to radically shape care delivery by building transformative interdisciplinary platforms to catalyze and nurture innovation at UCLA that lead to large-scale impact. Further, THINQ aspires to engage undergraduate students from various disciplines in training future leaders in Quality Improvement (QI) and Patient Safety.
Purpose: Over a decade ago, the Institute of Medicine sounded the call to improve the quality of health care in America by publishing “Crossing the Quality Chasm”. Cognizant of the challenges that health care professionals face to integrate quality improvement into their clinical practice, the Department of Medicine at UCLA Health sought to be one of the first programs to train undergraduate students in quality improvement methodologies to serve as a meaningful part of the mission and agenda of the Department of Medicine.
Description: The first THINQ Fellows cohort received 61 applications and accepted 20 students from 8 different disciplines. All Fellows completed a 20-item pre-intervention evaluation prior to the beginning of the THINQ curriculum. Of note, the first THINQ cohort rated their familiarity with a career in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety as a 2.9 out 5 (respondents = 20), which corresponds to “Neither Familiar or Unfamiliar”. Following administration of the 20-item evaluation following the conclusion of the Year 1 curriculum, the THINQ cohort rated their familiarity with a career in Quality Improvement and Patient Safety as a 4.0 out of 5 (P<0.05). Significant improvements were seen in questions pertaining to Quality Improvement methodology, Patient Safety, Patient Care, and Systems-Based Practice.
Conclusions: While many medical schools are incorporating quality improvement methodologies in their curriculum for both undergraduate and graduate medical education, we are the first to train future leaders in quality improvement and patient safety who are undergraduate students from multiple disciplines. To the investigator’s knowledge, no group has evaluated QI education and training involving undergraduate students from multiple disciplines. Multidisciplinary QI education aimed at creating QI leaders is believed to be feasible in a large, academic medical center and may improve undergraduate QI preparation through meaningful QI project participation.