Article Text
Abstract
Background The need for training in quality improvement for healthcare staff is well acknowledged, but long-term outcomes of such training are hard to evaluate. Behaviour change, improved organisational performance and results are sought for, but these variables are complex, multifactorial and difficult to assess.
Aim The purpose of this article is to explore the personal and organisational outcomes identified by participants over 14 years of university-led QI courses for healthcare professionals.
Method Inspired by the Kirkpatrick model for evaluation, we used concept mapping, a structured mixed method that allows for richness of data to be captured and visualised by inviting stakeholders throughout the process. In total, 331 previous course participants were included in the study by responding to two prompts, and 19 stakeholders taking part in the analysis process by doing the sorting.
Result Two maps, one for personal outcomes and one for organisational outcomes, show clusters of the responses from previous course participants and how the outcomes relate to each other in meta-clusters. Both maps show possible long-term outcomes described by the previous course participants.
Conclusion The results of this study indicate that it is possible that training in quality improvement with a strong experiential pedagogical approach fosters a long-term improvement capability for the course participants and, even more important, a long-term improvement capability (and increased improvement skill) in their respective organisations.
- quality improvement
- continuing professional development
- continuous quality improvement
- healthcare quality improvement
This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited, appropriate credit is given, any changes made indicated, and the use is non-commercial. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/.
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Footnotes
Contributors FS, PA, BB and AH designed the study and performed the analysis. FS, PA, AH and BB facilitated partnership with the involved stakeholders. FS and AH did the data collection. LV provided methodological expertise. BB performed the statistical analysis. All authors contributed by commenting the drafts and agreed to the final version of this manuscript.
Funding This work was supported by the Regional Cancer Center West, Gothenburg, Sweden.
Competing interests None declared.
Patient consent for publication Not required.
Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.
Data availability statement Data are available upon reasonable request.