Education as a catalyst for healthcare transformation -Experiences from a quality improvement education initiative

Purpose - Quality improvement programs are still quite rare in healthcare, and often healthcare professionals that are given roles like ―quality managers”, ―organization development” or ―improvement leaders” do not have a common understanding of a basic underlying theory of quality improvement. As Deming, inspired by the pragmatic philosopher C I Lewis, said: ―Without a theory experiences teaches nothing”. In 2003 the Division of Quality Sciences at Chalmers was asked to provide a common theory to quality managers and improvement leaders - an academic course (30 ECTS) was created. Based on the very positive responses from the participants of this course and their employers we decided to create a Centre for Healthcare Improvement (CHI) at Chalmers with a focus on research and education with a pronounced objective to make a difference to healthcare organizations especially in the region of Vastra Gotaland. From these experiences we want to suggest that education could be used as a catalyst for healthcare transformation. Methodology - Since the starting point of the educational initiative in 2004 we have followed the development of improvement activities and educational initiatives in the surrounding healthcare system, i.e. the Vastra Gotaland region with special emphasis on the Skaraborg hospital group and the Regional Cancer Centre Vast as cases. Findings - Education has been at the core of the initiative at CHI and a lot of improvement activities have been catalysed through the course participants and their organizations. A research program with an action research profile supporting healthcare transformation has been created. The education together with this research has created a snowball effect leading to many improvement projects and a shift towards an improvement, process oriented and customer/patient focused culture in the participating healthcare organizations. Originality - In today´s search for remedies of the emerging health care crisis new ways of improving healthcare are needed. Education has been suggested as an important possibility. However, few long term results have been published - especially not long term effects from continual education in improvement science. The contribution herein gives a contribution to the literature on improvement science and corresponding education initiatives.