Developing a quality and safety curriculum for fellows: lessons learned from a neonatology fellowship program.
Munish Gupta, Steve Ringer, Anjala Tess, Anne Hansen, John Zupancic
Author Information
Munish Gupta: Harvard Combined Fellowship Program in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, Boston, Mass; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Mass. Electronic address: mgupta@bidmc.harvard.edu.
Steve Ringer: Harvard Combined Fellowship Program in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, Boston, Mass; Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, Mass.
Anjala Tess: Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Mass.
Anne Hansen: Harvard Combined Fellowship Program in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, Boston, Mass; Boston Children's Hospital, Boston, Mass.
John Zupancic: Harvard Combined Fellowship Program in Neonatal-Perinatal Medicine, Boston, Mass; Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, Mass.
Formal training in health care quality and safety has become an important component of medical education at all levels, and quality and safety are core concepts within the practice-based learning and system-based practice medical education competencies. Residency and fellowship programs are rapidly attempting to incorporate quality and safety curriculum into their training programs but have encountered numerous challenges and barriers. Many program directors have questioned the feasibility and utility of quality and safety education during this stage of training. In 2010, we adopted a quality and safety educational module in our neonatal fellowship program that sought to provide a robust and practical introduction to quality improvement and patient safety through a combination of didactic and experiential activities. Our module has been successfully integrated into the fellowship program's curriculum and has been beneficial to trainees, faculty, and our clinical services, and our experience suggests that fellowship may be particularly well suited to incorporation of quality and safety training. We describe our module and share tools and lessons learned during our experience; we believe these resources will be useful to other fellowship programs seeking to improve the quality and safety education of their trainees.
