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."