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The newspaper of The Johns Hopkins University March 21, 2005 | Vol. 34 No. 26
 
Residents, Students at JHH Partner to Test Patient Care Effort

The Johns Hopkins Hospital is one of 12 teaching hospitals selected to receive a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation grant designed to test if a multidisciplinary group of medical residents, graduate nursing students and administrative residents could partner more closely with senior hospital management to improve care. The Achieving Competence Today grants are part of a new initiative developed by RWJ in partnership with the Association of American Medical Colleges and the American Association of Colleges of Nursing.

The ACT curriculum is designed to help participants develop the skills needed to design systems to improve patient care. By providing an intensive, yet practical, exposure to health care systems and clinical practice improvement, ACT is intended to change the way these learners think about and deliver care.

The project at Johns Hopkins will have medical residents at the hospital and Bayview Medical Center, graduate nursing students from the School of Nursing and administrative residents use a Web-based, self-directed curriculum that teaches them about the organization, design and financing of health care. Over the four-week course, they will identify and study real-life problems culled from their own experiences with patients and use these examples to develop best practices improvements and quality improvement plans that address specific problems.

Senior quality improvement executives at each grant site will team with the residents and nurses to help them develop improvement plans that address a particular institutional area of concern. These areas could include medical errors, continuity of care, performance measurement, chronic illness management or patient satisfaction. The first team project started at Johns Hopkins in January 2005.

"The grant gives us a wonderful opportunity to do in a more formal and structured manner what Hopkins has always done: bringing together diverse teams of health care professionals to find new ways to improve patient care," said principal investigator Judy Reitz, executive vice president and chief operating officer for The Johns Hopkins Hospital. "This approach, and the solutions developed as a result, will serve as models for other health care centers for improving patient safety and patient care."

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